


To Rekindle a Fire

by poppunkwolf



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Angst, Background Emma Swan/Lily Page, Dragon Queen - Freeform, Drama, Drug Addiction, F/F, Family Drama, Friendship, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Magic, Mild Sexual Content, Romance, Witchcraft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-11
Updated: 2016-08-22
Packaged: 2018-08-08 04:34:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 34,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7743568
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/poppunkwolf/pseuds/poppunkwolf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maleficent is the most powerful sorceress in the land, but when the queen breaks her heart she succumbs to an addictive drug called curse and spirals into self-destruction. Now in Storybrooke she must atone for her past mistakes and learn the power fueled by love and forgiveness... or allow her secrets to destroy her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Oparu](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Oparu/gifts), [xxIzabela](https://archiveofourown.org/users/xxIzabela/gifts).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have content warnings that you can scroll to at the bottom of each chapter if applicable. I don't put warnings in the main tags if they're not graphic or centrally featured, in order to avoid the suggestion that the fic revolves around or heavily features these things.

The service was lovely, if a funeral can ever be called that. The rain was hard but timely, and Maleficent hoped that it might feel cleansing, the rhythmic drumming of water to dirt an announcement of the reliable routines of nature, even those routines which were cold and relentlessness. She hoped it could ground the situation to bring even miniscule comfort to Regina.

Everyone wanted to gather, to chatter, to give each other comfort and company and good food at Granny’s. There were so many damn people in this town, more than you would imagine, and they were all the made-you-a-casserole type, but Maleficent had known Regina before anyone else except Rumplestiltskin and Snow White. She knew that her mourning style was to be alone, and when Regina left the diner early she chose not to overstep, until the talk around her, about Regina, began to take a dark turn.

 

“Regina?”

It seemed unlike the woman who had fortressed herself against everything to just leave her front door unlocked. Maleficent stepped into the house of immaculate décor and let her eyes wander up the staircase. She could go searching for her but wondered if what she found would be something she could handle. Something she would be welcome to handle after everything they had gone through in the quest for the author and then little interaction as they got tied up in their separate lives. She only knew about Robin because the sight of him strolling around with Regina had been a mainstay. Then Regina had given her the only thing she could ever want or ask for when she brought back her Lily, her beautiful, wonderful daughter. Regina had then sliced Lily’s hand open, stolen a drop of her blood, and triggered Lily’s dangerous tottering into her nascent dragon transformation.

She did not know where they stood.

She trekked up the stairs and followed the sound of sobbing until she came to the bedroom. Regina sat at the edge of her bed and held a framed photograph in her hand. She was doubled over in overwhelmed anguish, her cries of sorrow striking into Maleficent’s heart.

Once upon a time, Regina had destroyed an entire world for her sorrow. But she was not the person she once was, and if the whole town knew this of course she knew. But Regina seemed to feel everything with remarkable depth. Maleficent’s fear was not in what Regina would do to others, but in what she might do to herself.

“Regina?”

Regina had certainly heard her, but did not acknowledge her. Maleficent came in and knelt before her on the floor beside the bed. She took Regina’s hands, the hands wet with tears she was trying so hard to wipe away before they could ever manifest shamefully on the reddened apples of her cheeks.

“You don’t have to hide your tears,” Maleficent said to her, holding her hands in her own. Still on her knees, she wrapped her arms around Regina’s waist, and pulled her in. Regina allowed this, but kept her own hands at her sides in hesitation. After a moment, Mal felt her lean into the embrace.

She placed her ear against Regina’s chest. She breathed into the unfailing rhythm of the heart beat against her eardrum. She did not realize that she was listening with such intensity, until Regina spoke.

“What are you doing?”

Maleficent looked up at her, still holding her close. “I’m listening for your heartbeat.”

“Did you think it wouldn’t be there?”

“I was hoping I could tell the difference between your true heart beating and the beating of a distant heart locked away somewhere. It is an art that you’ve so mastered, that it can hardly be differentiated.”

“Why do you think I would take my heart out?” Her voice was broken, as if she was being accused of something heinous.

“Because the word in town is, that’s what you last did when you lost the person you truly love.”

“Henry.”

She waited for that tale, the story that had played out while she lay dormant, before Rumplestiltskin had resuscitated her ashes.

“When Pan cursed us back to the Enchanted Forest, I believed I would never see my son again. But a pale idiot I have come to care about once told me ‘find a way’.” Regina wiped her tears again. “You can be assured that I haven’t ripped my own heart out.”

The rhythm of Regina’s heart against her ear was reassuring. “I want you to know, Regina, that you have me. No matter what this sorrow does to you, you know that I have seen you at your worst and I am not afraid to bring you back.”

Maleficent felt Regina’s arms wrap around her shoulders, and the convulsing of Regina crying against her.

 

When Regina first came to her, sweet and plucky and triumphantly delighted to succeed at magically lighting a fireplace, Maleficent had had no hope for ever becoming her dragon self again. It required too much focus, too much inner consciousness. But Regina’s faith had gotten to her, and she allowed Regina to take her to the eternally burning tree and remind her of who she really was. She had wanted, in that moment as she soared to the sky with the wind under her wings, to give as much to Regina as she had given her.

As much as the malevolent imp wanted total control over his apprentice, it wasn’t her last visit, and Maleficent taught her everything and found jubilation in the young lady’s wonder. Regina had taken to fire magic like any dragon would. She even created her own spells. She was a paradox, a mixture of earnest elation and something dark, something arrestingly needy and pained and destructive.

“Focus on your anger,” Maleficent instructed her, out in a barren field of hay and dirt with one wilting, sad sapling sticking from the dry ground. “Focus on what it felt like to be wrapped in vines and have your mother march you back to that castle.”

Regina’s eyes hardened as she looked at the sapling, and the neutral pleasant upturn of her mouth turned to a pressed focus.

“Now light it on fire,” Maleficent commanded, and then just as abruptly said, “Stop!”

Regina’s shoulders, her hands, her fingers, were tensed as she stared with fixed anger at the sapling. Upon hearing the order to stop, she relaxed a little.

“I can see the tension in your hands,” she said. “You’re not here to shoot fire balls from your hands. This fire is everything within you and you have to channel the emotions behind it into breath. That’s what it takes to breathe fire.”

Regina inhaled and exhaled, fixed on the little tree, visualizing.

“Tune out every other body part,” Maleficent instructed. “At the same time, remember that this is not about intellect. It’s feeling. Breathe in Snow White’s carelessness. Breathe in your mother’s cruelty. Breathe in everything about your husband. And then breathe out the flames that would take them all down.”

There was a part of her that wasn’t sure if Regina was physically capable of doing this. She remembered the lessons she had been taught as a girl, by a mother who was not a sorcerer but whose formidable dragon power had amazed her. But it was so long ago, and she had been so alone since, with not even an inkling that she could or should teach magic to anyone, let alone a human.

Then the fire came, and it was beautiful, a surge of heated rage, a burst of combustion that rippled through the air and embraced the little sapling in red, orange, golden flames. Regina staggered back, falling in surprise.

Maleficent watched the sapling in equal awe before breaking into a proud smile. Her joy spread to Regina, who looked up at her from the ground and broke into laughter. Maleficent reached for her and pulled her to her feet.

“You said I could ride on your back if I was able to succeed, so guess who has to take me flying?” Regina giggled and wrapped her arms around Mal from behind. She jumped on her back, planting a kiss on her cheek.

“You appall me,” Maleficent said teasingly, holding Regina piggyback with some effort as she circled around the tree to admire her apprentice’s work. “You’ll never be a powerful sorceress unless you cultivate an air of fabulous, vain aloofness and here you are giggling like a toddler at tea time and giving _kisses_.”

Regina hopped down. “Okay,” she said, feigning an indifferent demeanor as she turned her back and gazed into the sunset. “I’ll have you know you’ll never receive a kiss from me again.”

“I regret my words immediately. Have mercy, my queen.” She reached for Regina’s waist and pulled her closer with a laugh. She always associated laughter with Regina. Regina was so forthcoming with her own laughter, and since she could remember, Mal only really laughed when Regina was around. Mal accepted when Regina wrapped her arms around her neck and pulled her closer.

Her lips against the lovely queen’s melted her soul, so much that she may as well have been a raw, exposed heart there for the taking. She kept one arm wrapped around Regina’s waist and let the other hand cup Regina’s face as she kissed her passionately. They held each other in the pure bliss of the embrace, refusing to separate, breathing into one another.

They continued to hold each other close upon parting their kiss, and Maleficent said, “How long until you have to return?”

Regina’s face reflected just the briefest flash of sorrow before she answered, “The king will be home in three days.”

“Well,” Maleficent said, “we’ll just have to see how many new things I can teach you in that time.”

 

Maleficent was not Regina’s first love, but she was Regina’s first lover, and there were no stops to what she was willing to do to take Regina to her highest high. No one had ever lit inside Maleficent the sense of desire and reverence as Regina. After flying, they came back to Maleficent’s castle. Regina’s soft skin heated against hers took her to another place. Regina was a delight to uncover, an embodiment of sweet discovery and sultry passion. They made love through the night until daybreak and then slept naked beneath the sunlight in Maleficent’s bed. Later, awake and absorbed in their mist of sensuality, they lay languidly, and she gave Regina kiss after kiss, against her full lips, her irresistible jaw, her soft neck, the perfect arch of her breasts, the flat surface of her stomach, the fleshy, delicious curve of her hips, the enchanting softness of her inner thigh. She nipped and licked fervently into the fragrant wetness between her legs, causing Regina to gasp, pulling her blonde hair, whimpering, pleading. The taste of Regina against her tongue was inebriating. Maleficent teased her mercilessly, granted gentle kisses, before placing her tongue in just the right spot. Regina erupted in gasping, quivering sobs, her fingernails clawing pleasingly into Maleficent’s skin and her voice giving disoriented praise. Maleficent was intoxicated by Regina, so pretty and undone beneath her, and she was full with Regina’s abundance.

They went to the cliff side where the sun set over the magnificent, sparkling ocean with such splendor that no one could resist swooning at the sight. They sat in romantic dresses on a gold-trimmed quilt and traded kisses. They spent the next two days repeating their ritual: magic, laughter, sex, romance, love.

Maleficent did not know how unhappy she once had been until it changed. She used to rely on her illicit concoction of toadstool, sleeping curse, and seawater to drag herself through life, and those were her darkest days. She had unintentionally weaned herself away from it and forgotten it entirely as her relationship with Regina carried on. She wanted Regina to also be free from the thing that imprisoned her. She imagined the day that Regina would escape that man, but eventually she had to go back, to poise herself and play the part of the queen of the land, the wife of a man she couldn’t stand to talk about and the child she was keen on destroying for the betrayal she could not forgive.

She spent a lot of time regretting the way she lingered with that plan, waiting for some catalyst instead of ending him at the first sign he had ever disrupted a hair beneath the lady’s dense crown. There were so many ways that things could have played out differently. It was not the darkest of her horrific regrets, but it was the first of many in the tale of her love for Regina.

 

They tried Granny’s again, at a time less populated by concerned sincere well-wishers. They got apple cider, something Regina found comfort in, and they talked.

“I love how happy you are,” Regina said. “It’s not a feeling I’ve had a lot lately, except with the kids, and it helps me to see you so overjoyed with Lily.” Regina’s smile lit her dark eyes.

Maleficent broke into an effervescent beam at the mention of her daughter. “She called me _Mom_ the other day.”

“What did she call you before?”

“I told her she could call me anything she wanted, but I would love if she came to want to call me Mom or Mother. I knew it would take time. She was uncomfortably avoiding addressing me at all for a while. And then she said it. I tried to react casually but of course you know how emotional I am. She said, ‘Bye Mom, I’ll see you after work’ and I was a bawling mess. But it’s also because I’m so happy she’s living with me now. There was a point where I thought she would leave. There was a time where I felt that I was auditioning to be her mother, begging her not to walk past those town lines and out of my life forever.”

Maleficent had put her disgust for Rumplestiltskin and his sinister shenanigans aside so that she could find information on what had happened to her daughter. Part of their deal had been that he would make space for her in Storybrooke just like the original dark curse had done for everyone else, with a house and a small treasury that would allow her to live in the town. At first she had been heartbroken when Lily had preferred to get a room at Granny’s rather than stay in her home, but it had allowed Lily her own space while she figured out who she was and contended with the confusion of her background and their new reunion. Lily had also made acquaintances with Ruby while staying at the inn, which led to her current employment, so it was the right call. Eventually Lily had moved in with her in her quiet, secluded home in the woods.

Regina took her hand, holding it with a solemn firmness.

“But now… she’s here. She’s here with me and wants to stay and I’ve stopped fearing she’ll leave me.”

Regina said, “She’s so beautiful. She looks so much like you.”

“I first thought that when I saw her as a dragon. I’ve never known anyone like myself before, other than my mother.”

“I’m so happy for the two of you. I’m sorry for ever saying otherwise.”

Maleficent cast her gaze down. “Are we talking about that now?”

Regina took a deep breath. “I think we’ve agreed to forgive each other.”

Maleficent held her gaze. “I know you didn’t mean to break my heart. I didn’t mean to break yours either. I hope you know I loved you even through it all.”

 

There was a pair of mirrors through which Regina and Maleficent connected, sent messages to one another from afar, but one day Mal could not pull Regina through to her and she worried herself sick from mid-fall into winter. She came dressed as a peasant to Leopold’s castle grounds and listened for news of the queen but heard no reports of her. She brought an apple cart just outside the castle every day to remain unassuming as she tried to find the weakness in the magic fortress Cora had built around the estate, a fortress that kept her out and reeked of spite. She lurked near Regina’s father’s home but he and his visitors and servants only discussed her as if she were fine in the royal castle. She was devastated as she made no progress, found no information.

She hid one day behind the tree trunks near the castle and saw the princess leave surrounded by an entourage of guards. How easy it would be, she thought, to put them all under a sleeping curse and to steal away with the little girl. The royal castle did not know that she would not hurt a child, even one that Regina wholly hated. They would draw upon their knowledge of her power and their lore of dragons, and the desperate king would surely trade his disfavored wife for his beloved daughter.

She pulled herself back from her blundering fantasy, the idea that through heavy-handed measures she could ever somehow just stroll away with the queen. She reminded herself that Regina’s unknown whereabouts were not the same as her endangerment. Maybe she was safe somewhere. But it did not feel true at all.

 Then Regina came to Maleficent’s castle in the dead of night and the cold of winter.

“What are you doing? You’re freezing!” Maleficent gasped, letting Regina in. Regina collapsed into her arms, and she felt so soft and wonderful, even though she was cold and seemed weakly and had something else about her that Maleficent could not name but was suggested in her skin and eyes. “I’m so glad you’re alive.” She brought her beside the fireplace and kissed her icy fingers. “Why are you so cold?”

 “I tried to transport here and ended up an hour away,” she said, embarrassment tinging her tone. She continued her confession, a hard undercurrent to her voice, a refusal to be broken. “He locked me away. I woke up in the mines and I was trapped for months with no visitors except him until I killed a guard and took his clothing.”

She knew it was not the first death that had happened at Regina’s hands, but she was also struck by the emotionless calm in her voice. She did not mind Regina’s darkness – she considered it a saving grace, the thing that made them truly see one another – but she still felt that something more than ominous was coming.

The morning time was brighter but conditions were still unideal for leaving castle grounds. Maleficent decided to teach Regina the conjuring spell, a classic one that seemed appropriate for a person who took wholesome pleasure in simple delights. Regina conjured a medium sized cake and split it in half. Maleficent indulged her silly charms and ate a piece of her half before giving the rest over to Regina, who happily took it after eating her own. Maleficent kissed icing from Regina’s sweet lips.

The following day, they bundled in coats and traipsed through the frozen apple orchards. When Regina threw balls of snow at her, Maleficent threw snow right back, and they took turns tackling each other. They play-fought at the top of the hill until Regina slipped and, clinging to each other, they rolled and tumbled to the bottom, crashing into an apple tree. The tree shook upon impact and dropped apple after apple, and Maleficent laughed and used her body to shield Regina from the mild peril falling from above them. Regina giggled beneath her until Maleficent brought their lips together, and even then they could not stop laughing through their kisses.

They gathered the apples, and since Regina craved pastries they decided to make sweets the old fashioned way. They found an apple turnover recipe and made a baker’s dozen.

Waiting for the pastries to be done, Regina sat in a chair and licked the spoon and then the bowl while Mal watched her with enchanted adoration. “You’re going to get sick from all that sugar,” Mal remarked, procuring a cup of water and magically heating it. She put a strainer into the mug, full of a soothing herbal tea blend, and set it at the table beside Regina.

Regina’s face scrunched into a discontented frown.  “It smells unpleasant,” she said, the frown creasing into her forehead as she leaned her whole body away.

“You’ve had this blend before and you loved it,” Maleficent said, but that was all she could get out before Regina had sunk to her knees and was vomiting onto the wooden floor in the middle of her kitchen.

Maleficent rushed to her side and pulled her long dark hair back. The unpleasantness of being near Regina’s sick mess was drowned out by the return of her sense of foreboding. When Regina seemed to calm down, Maleficent was tempted to wave the vomit away with a swoop of her hand, but instead went to get a handful of kitchen rags. She cleaned the mess as she looked at Regina with apprehension.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” Regina said, wiping towels alongside her in an embarrassed, frantic hurry. “I’m sorry.”

“When did this last happen?” Maleficent asked, trying to keep her voice nonchalant. In case she was wrong.

“I sometimes get sick in the mornings lately,” Regina said with an oblivion that Maleficent found breathtaking. Regina took on a guilty tone. “But I have been trying to ignore it since it goes away by mid-day and I did not think it was contagious. I know it’s evening but whichever herb is in the tea made me nauseous. I hope I have not spread whatever this is to you.” She tilted her head at Maleficent in curiosity. “Are you even capable of getting sick?”

Maleficent focused with new understanding on the glow of Regina’s fair skin. “Regina,” she said. “I believe you are pregnant.”

Maleficent would forever remember the panic and horror in Regina’s eyes.

They spent the rest of the evening in Maleficent’s library, Regina sitting and staring in a dazed shock while Maleficent hunted through spells. There was a simple spell to confirm the pregnancy and see how far along it was. They were able to determine that it had happened midway through Regina’s time in the mines.

“Sometimes I used to hear girls talk of these kinds of things,” Regina said, at Maleficent’s library table with an opened spell book in her hands. “Servants. Their tones held such conspiracy, but it was never appropriate to include a lady of my standing in these conversations. I’m afraid that I am… naïve.”

“It is not always obvious.”

“You knew before I did,” Regina replied, holding her gaze. “You know so much of these things, how they work. How did you learn?”

Maleficent looked down at the combination of elixirs laid before her. “I was orphaned at a young age as you know. I practically raised myself and certainly did not have other dragons to teach me. But I have overheard humans talk of signs and it all seems fairly straightforward. You lay together with a man, and perhaps there is a baby.”

“I wish it really were that way,” Regina said.

“Which way?”

“Together,” Regina clarified. “To expect your first child because you chose to be together. Not because your cruel husband came to seize hold of you in the dark.”

 “My love,” Maleficent breathed. She imagined Regina afraid in the mines, and cursed her own failure to find her, to rescue her. She took the spell book from Regina and handed her the vial of a thick grey-black liquid. “Let’s draw you a bath.”

Upstairs, Maleficent sat upon a wooden stool by the bathtub and kept her hand clasped with Regina’s on the edge of the tub. Regina sat naked in the hot, unsoapy water and cried relentlessly, holding onto Maleficent and breathing deeply through her misery as the water turned blood red.

“You are the most powerful sorceress in the land. How can you love someone so powerless?”

“We are all powerless against some things. But this is his shame, not yours, my sweet. And you are more powerful than you know. Your strength staggers me.”

“I do not want to be in such a condition again as long as I live. Tell me the spell for that.”

“I can create a potion for you. But the real solution is to kill your husband.”

Regina would follow her counsel, but it would take her another seven years to do so, and by then her hunger for power – and her fear of the stakes of being powerless - had consumed her, destroying her laughter, rotting her inside like a poisoned apple.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter has sexual content and references a canonical character death, a rape, and an abortion.


	2. Chapter 2

Regina had herself to be strong for, but she also had another person to guide through the grief of losing Robin, and that person stood on the front steps of Regina’s home with a satchel on his shoulder, a beanie on his little head, and a dimpled smile on his face. Regina locked the door behind her and the three of them began to stroll to the library. Maleficent knew that Regina was telling the truth about her heart, but if there had ever been any doubt, it would have been assuaged upon seeing her with Roland.

“Thanks for joining us on our library trip,” Regina said to Maleficent.

“Well you know I’m still getting to know the town,” Maleficent said. “And I appreciate you showing me around.”

“I already know what book I want you to read to me,” Roland said to Regina. “I want a book about a monkey like my stuffed animal.”

“I used to read Henry a book called _Curious George_ ,” Regina said to him, holding his hand. “We’ll get you that and tons of other books to read at bedtime.”

Maleficent watched the way Roland smiled up at Regina. This was a side of her that Mal had never seen, not even with Henry who was past the need for the bubbly enthusiasm Regina was using with Roland.

“Stories are their own type of magic,” Regina remarked to both of them in general as they all walked along the main road. “They give us hope.”

Roland nodded up at her.

“They make us laugh.” She tickled Roland’s chin, and he giggled.

“They take us out of this world sometimes, so that we can dream better when things are hard.”

The child nodded with understanding.

“And sometimes they can transform our entire perspective.”

“Yes, like how papa has passed away, but we know he is not sad or hurt,” Roland said with solemn composure.

“That’s why we’ve been doing a new storybook at bedtime every day,” Regina explained to Mal. “They help us feel better about our own feelings and have sweet dreams, right Roland?”

“Right,” he said.

“Today we’re returning the ones we have, and we’ll get at least seven more. Next week we’ll come back.”

“Regina is teaching me how to read by myself,” Roland said with a beam at Maleficent. “She says my papa would be proud of me.”

“He would be,” Maleficent agreed. She had felt Robin’s legacy at his funeral, but she knew nothing personally of him except that he had done a charming job with this child, and she could see that Regina was channeling her feelings for Robin into her abiding attention to caring for Roland.

She had come to Regina that day of the funeral out of concern for her, and Regina had embraced her gratefully, but now she understood as she watched Regina carry on with Roland that Regina would have survived no matter what.

 

Roland was flipping through picture books while Maleficent and Regina sat together in the novel section with their eye on him.

“I didn’t know him before,” Maleficent said. “But I can see how well you’re doing with him. His mourning does not have to destroy him, and I can see that you’re making this better for him.”

“It means a lot to know that. I’m trying. I care about Roland but Robin and I never talked about what we would do if this situation ever happened, and I’ve never labeled myself with Roland. I want him to have his best chance and I sometimes worry that staying with me isn’t that.”

“He is so fortunate to have you. He is an orphan but he is still loved, and that is more than most could hope for.”

Regina, in an adjacent chair, held her hand out for Maleficent to take, and they clasped their fingers together, stretched across the chairs. “I sense that you’re thinking of your own mother.”

“Yes. And while I raised myself after she died, I do not know what I would have done if I had not befriended the fairies and learned the magic necessary to survive.”

“I sometimes forget you’re native to light magic,” Regina said.

“Because I have been so wicked.” She said it lightheartedly.

“Because you taught me dark magic.” Regina gave her a sultry smile. “But you _were_ deliciously wicked.”

“Do you need any help?”

They both turned to the sight of Belle.

Regina gave Belle an utterly mayoral smile. “No, we are doing quite well navigating this one on one conversation, but if we somehow need help we’ll ask you.” She took her hand from Maleficent’s and placed her hands together in a proper pose at her lap.

“Okay,” Belle said. “Although if you have a few moments, I would love to ask you about a program I’m thinking of creating.”

“Sure,” Maleficent said, enjoying the annoyance in Regina’s smile. She was not sure Regina would ever carry something as familiar as the darkness that had made her take her on in more ways than one, but she couldn’t resist watching her suppress her impatience.

“Well,” Belle said, taking a seat near them. “The library has a theater on the bottom floor, and it’s never been used. I know Roland has been a frequent library visitor, and we’ve also had other children his age come by. Henry and Violet have spent time here, and there’s Nicholas and Ava, and so many others. So I’d like to know if you’d be interested in a children’s theater class. They would all read the same play and we’d have them perform it for the town. I’d have to secure volunteers to be directors, costume makers, and more, but for now I want to know how you like the idea. Would you bring Roland to that kind of thing?”

“It’s adorable,” Maleficent gushed proddingly. “And Roland loves it here, so he’d probably love to come more than once a week.”

“It is definitely the most wholesome thing I’ve ever heard of,” Regina said with that same plastered smile.

Belle clasped her hands together. “This is great. I have to ask more parents, but I’m excited to get this going.”

“I can tell,” Maleficent said. “You’re positively glowing.”

Belle’s smile took on a bashful tone, and she touched her abdomen with both hands. “Rumple and I are not supposed to talk about it for another week,” she said. “But I have such a good feeling and I want to tell everyone. I’m pregnant.”

“Aww,” Regina said, in a tone that Maleficent decided needed an award for being exactly one notch above ‘deadpan’.

“Thank you,” Belle continued. “I just keep thinking about how many more things we can do in town to make it an even more welcoming place to raise kids. Maybe in a few years when my baby is old enough, the kids’ community theater will be this established tradition, you know? It’s a bit silly but I think all the time about who this child is going to be. We have so many hopes.”

“I relate,” Maleficent said. “When I found out I was going to be a mother, I dreamt all day of the joyful things I could give my daughter.”

Regina turned softened eyes to her.

“Teaching her magic and how to fly, making her poppets, sending her to school and seeing her come back with so many friends to play with.”

Belle nodded, looking at the floor.

“I’m sure you know what happened. But it’s okay, because my baby came back to me. She’s an adult so there are a lot of memories we’ll never have. But spending time with her, especially when I can teach her something, is still the best thing that ever happened to me. So indulge every hope. When you have a baby that you truly want and cherish, nothing is silly about that.”

“Thank you,” Belle said. “It might be the hormones talking, but can I hug you?”

Maleficent nodded with a good-natured smile, and the two women stood and embraced each other. “I was going to ask you the same thing. Ever since I found Lily, there’s something about baby talk that makes me unable to resist the happiness. You deserve this. Congratulations.”

 

Regina was sharing her house with Zelena and baby Robin as of the day of the funeral. They had also moved Roland in on that day, and Henry spent relatively equal time at each of his moms’ homes with no set schedule. With appearances by Emma, Mary Margaret, David, Violet, and essentially anyone, the house was always teeming with people. Mal came by for dinner occasionally so that she could see how Regina was doing.

“Thank you for being there for her,” Zelena said to Maleficent as they washed dishes after dinner and everyone gathered in the living room to play mafia.

“I’m glad she’s had you to lean on as well,” Maleficent replied.

“Well,” Zelena said. “I love my sister and I’m glad we’re getting along, but it was my true love who killed hers. And it was me before that who tried to ruin the two of them, so it’s a complicated situation. It’s good she has someone a bit more removed from it all who can bring her comfort.”

“How are you and the baby doing?”

“There is no question,” Zelena said, “that if Robin was still around, he would be able to make that little green bean a better person than I ever could. But that just makes me even more motivated to be good. For him, and for her. Some part of me will always love Hades but I don’t think I could have become a better person with him.”

It was not lost on her that here they were, three supposed villains in a house full of rosy-cheeked little ones, discussing redemption and second chances and transformation and the power of love in a town that only existed because of the darkest curse to ever exist. Rumplestiltskin, who had masterminded it all, was awaiting his own baby, his chance to be better. He was also the only person who had been around to see the randomness of the world as long as Maleficent had. Life was always so strange – It had never stopped finding ways to surprise her.

 

It was an Agrabahn viper that fatally bit the king as he lay in his bed, said the rumor mills, and it was the genie who had clearly sent it to murder him, they said. The man responsible had seemingly vanished, and the knights were hunting for him.

The queen seemed devastated, but she was staying strong for the sake of her subjects. She had donned herself in elegant black and shed graceful tears at the funeral, then booked a far away meeting so she could assume kingdom business.

Regina materialized before Maleficent in her castle, clad in show-stealing sharp angles and smoky makeup.

Maleficent ran to embrace her. “So it’s true.” She kissed her, laughing. “You’ve freed yourself.”

Regina gave a wide, red-lipped smile. “You were right the whole time. I should’ve slain the ogre years ago. Even better, I conned some simpleton into doing it and no one in the kingdom is the wiser.”

Regina seated herself in front of Maleficent’s fireplace and tugged the red rose from her lapel. She tossed it into the fire. “I wanted to tell you personally, but I can’t stay. I have to complete my plan to kill Snow White.”

“But you’re free,” Maleficent said, taking Regina’s hand in her own. “Stay. Let’s make a plan. We can leave the kingdom like we’ve always talked about.”

“I singlehandedly rule the entire kingdom now,” Regina snapped with impatience. “I have meetings to get to, business, and the task of finding someone who will rip Snow White’s heart out like she deserves so I can finally get my happy ending. I will visit you _after_ that.”

Maleficent was not afraid when Regina’s voice got this way, or when she used her haughty, icy demeanor to intimidate. She pulled Regina to her feet and wrapped her hands around her waist. “The kingdom is yours and that man is not in your way. This is tremendous news. Stop to feel. Let me take you out to the ocean side and we can properly celebrate this accomplishment.”

She knew Regina was won over by the smirk she was trying to resist. “You get the afternoon. Make it count.”

 

Humans cohered obstinately to their perception of dragons as fearsome and dangerous. And it was true that when she transformed, she was a creature no one could come up against and survive. But Regina was the one who saw her softness, her tenderness in dragon form. As a dragon she wanted nothing more than to bask in the sun or be carried by the wind currents. When she was little she had spent a lot more time as a dragon, playing in the woods near their castle with her mother, sparring with fire, or sleeping curled up together. Those were her best memories. When she and Regina had first felt the bloom of something that went beyond an apprenticeship, she would take Regina flying and they sometimes slept together in the daylight, Regina tucked under her wing. Today Regina clung to her back as they flew to the beach, and she was reminded again that Regina loved every part of her. Transforming back to human form, Maleficent spent the evening loving every part of Regina right back, bringing Regina to ecstasy on the sand beneath the cliffside where they used to come years ago, before Regina became so busy and so distracted. It used to be that when Regina was gone for months she would assume the worst, but now she knew in those cases that she was probably on a magical excursion with Rumplestiltskin, learning new ways to kill unicorns and curse happy families. But she had Regina for now, and she relished the way Regina pulled her close and met her on every wave of pleasure and emotion.

They lay naked together afterward, their skin against the sand. On her side close to Regina, Maleficent said, “I always imagined that the death of the king would change everything. But you’re not going to leave the crown, are you?”

“You can come visit me in the castle,” Regina said, looking up at the sky. “Especially after Snow White is dead and I don’t have to put up any appearances.”

“Leopold was the true monster,” Maleficent said. “And he is the one your suffering was about. What if you did not kill the girl?”

Regina sat up in the sand and turned a hard gaze upon her. “You’re _defending_ what Snow White did to me?”

“No.” Maleficent sat up as well and tried to take Regina’s hand, but Regina snatched it away. “I’m not defending Snow White. I’m trying to defend your heart. I have grown a lot in the past years. I cursed Aurora, and I was elated. But then I realized that it was because of you, not her. I realized that the best revenge is to be happy. I am not saying I want to become some fairy of happiness and pixie dust, granting wishes and wearing glitter. I truly don’t mind if she stays in that tortured sleep forever, but I also wouldn’t be as broken up as you would think, if her prince found her. It didn’t earn me my happiness, and I don’t think killing Snow will earn you yours. You are my happiness, and you love me, so let’s make a plan together that does not involve a useless revenge.”

Regina listened to the whole thing with skepticism and anger in her eyes. She stood up, poofing herself back into her funeral dress, and said, “Why are you trying to stop me from being powerful?”

“Regina, I know why you’re reacting this way, but you need to listen to me. You can have love and power.” Maleficent too stood and clothed herself.

“My mother said it to me, and I didn’t believe her, I didn’t know what she was talking about, but she was right: Love is weakness. You stand before me asking me to just _live_ like some commoner, let my enemies be happy, be too in love to see what needs to be done. How appropriate of you to bring up the fairies. Rumplestiltskin warned me. He said that because you learned light magic from them, and only taught yourself dark magic for your revenge, that you’re soft to your core. He said you would try to pull me back.”

“That foul little demon knows exactly how to manipulate you. He does not care about anyone but himself.”

“And that’s your problem,” Regina said. “That you don’t see why that self-interest has made him powerful, and will make _me_ powerful. Now you’ve decided to be against this plan even though I’ve had it the entire time I’ve known you.”

“Our whole relationship,” Maleficent said, “has involved understanding the darkness we carry, refusing to moralize to one another. But still pulling each other back from our very worst impulses. The path of vengeance you’re going down will not serve you.”

With icy stoicism, Regina said, “This is why I will not leave behind a chance for power for you. You are weak and you will bring me down with you.”

“I will stand by you whether or not you enact your revenge, but I am telling you, Rumplestiltskin is luring you toward a darkness you will not be able to come back from.”

“Maybe _this_ is what I should not come back to.” Regina gestured between the two of them. “Maybe your refusal to support me, your defense of Snow White, and your sad begging for attention are what I needed to hear, to have the strength to see how you have been holding me back.”

“You don’t mean any of this.”

“I know what I mean and so do you,” Regina said coldly. “I will not let you bring me back to that girl I was. If you ever want to see me again, you can stand on the side of the road and wave with all the peasants you have so much in common with.” She disappeared, and a moment later, so did the cloud of purple smoke as it dissipated out to the ocean.

 

Part of her thought, at first, for a little while, not out of faith but out of need, that Regina was coming back.

The part of her that walked past the apple trees and could still taste the sweet juice on Regina’s mouth from when she had kissed it off of her countless times.

The part of her that was cold by the fireplace but could not bring herself to light it, because if Regina were here, she would insist on being the one to do it. It was her first act of magic in Maleficent’s presence.

The part of her that lay alone in a bed where she had held Regina close so many times, in the castle that Regina had once described as her only safe place.

Part of her rotted with devastation over being left, because parts of Regina were in everything she saw, everything she touched.

If she could not escape Regina inside her own mind, she certainly could not escape the topic of her in town. Everyone loved to talk about the queen. Some people held tones of gossip, some of fear, some of concern, some of revolution. But they talked about her always. Years ago she had gone searching for Regina and wished more than anything that someone would have something, anything, to say about her. Now it was a kingdom-wide pastime. Maleficent strolled through the town market and purchased trinkets just to torture herself with the overheard conversations. Regina had driven Snow White from the castle. Snow White’s picture was absolutely everywhere, even though nobody with any observational skills believed what the posters said. They were all on the princess’s side.

Seeing the wanted posters everywhere, hearing how Regina had thrown herself fully into this unreasonable crusade, felt like the final declaration that her queen was not coming back to her.

At home, she sat in her potions room and held the bottle of diluted sleeping curse in her hands. She opened it, careful not to spill, and used the needle’s sharp point to penetrate the skin on her fingertip. When her body became heavy, she crawled to the floor and lay, blinking with great effort, and let herself sink into the numbing haze.

 

Regina was never coming back to her.

She shot curse into her body the minute she woke up in the mornings, so that her first debilitating, terrible, invasive thought could subside.

It distracted her from her appetite, and was easier than eating, so it replaced most meals.

It stopped her from caring about the mess of clothing and bedding and books and potions strewn everywhere.

It kept her from being quite so cold next to her abandoned fireplace.

It was never enough, and she found herself pricking curse into her skin only to do it once again within the hour, wondering why it was barely working, why it was fading. Sitting in her room one evening, she wondered if there was a direct way to consume more of it, and took a sip of it. The revolting bitterness was overpowered by the harsh shock she felt as the curse knocked her into a jolting sleep. She woke up with the sun high in the sky and wondered with a prickly, unsettled feeling how many days had passed. She shot enough of the curse to dissipate her unnerved confusion.

On a particular night, she could not make the trek all the way upstairs without being overcome with a hazy dizziness, so she passed out in an armchair. Sleeping with strange dreams of pink dancing elephants, she shivered and shivered before opening her eyes and seeing that her front doors were open. There was an active storm, and snow had blown inside to surround her. She groaned at the idea of having to summon enough magic to clean and unfreeze the entire downstairs. She wondered also when she had left the doors open, but she had been doing similar things a lot lately. She blinked her eyes, standing. She trudged over to the large double doors and pushed one and then the other closed. Looking around the room, she waved her hands to vanish the snow, but it remained, and the strain of her action caused her to sink against the doors.

She was losing her magic. Again, like during her time of addiction before Regina. This should have devastated her, but all she could despair about was how far across the room the bottle of curse sat. She sank lower to lay in the toe-deep snow covering her carpet. This was when she noticed someone’s tracks going into, but not out of, her home.

She did not have a plan, and did not know what to even assume she would find, but she crawled slowly on her knees next to the tracks. She made her way across the freezing living room and into the kitchen.

A beautiful, majestic, hickory brown unicorn stood beside her table and munched on the apples sitting upon it.

She sat on the floor in the snow, unmoving. She looked up at the creature for a moment before he turned to see her.

The unicorn picked up an apple in his mouth, approached Maleficent, and lowered his head to drop the fruit gingerly into her hands. He looked at her as if he were waiting for her to eat it.

“I forgot I had these,” she remarked to him. She looked at it and said, jesting, “I imagine it is enchanted now that it has unicorn slobber on it. Do you think it will make me strong enough to get up?”

He whinnied like he was in on it.

Maleficent bit into the apple. It was of course not enchanted, but it was her first item of food in perhaps days and she felt its nourishment in every part of her body. She continued to devour the apple, and when it was gone, she had the strength to stand and make her way to her cabinets for more food. She found a piece of bread whose staleness was not terrible, and she sat at her table to eat it beside her new unicorn friend who licked her face approvingly.

“You probably came in here to escape the cold, and did not expect this disappointment,” she said to him, looking around at the snow that was already melting all over everything. “But you can stay here if you want.”

Knowing that her foray into functionality would be fleeting, Maleficent got a broom and spent the next hour painstakingly sweeping as much snow as possible outside. She pulled the curtains down and laid them out as a giant makeshift towel over the floor, adding couch throw blankets and her few kitchen towels.

The unicorn settled into a corner of the room on a damp blanket and closed his eyes.

Exhausted from cleaning and her earlier failed attempt at magic, Maleficent wished she could make it up the stairs into her bed, or at least that the blankets there weren’t the only ones in the castle not absorbing melted snow. She joined the unicorn on the blanket and huddled up next to his comforting warmth, but not before locating the bottle near the armchair and shooting curse into her shaking body.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See the end note for a content warning.

She knew she was torturing herself, but she could not help it. She would go to the tavern and drown her sorrows in ale or rum, whose effects mixed with curse caused her to have surges of manic energy. She would listen to them talk about the queen and the princess, then she would dance on tabletops, flirt with women, and gamble with pirates before going through a crash somewhere in the woods.

A beautiful woman in green with dark skin and golden hair, who spent her nights singing patrons to their deepest heartbreak – those who were not already experiencing that – approached Maleficent tonight and gave a touch to her arm that felt more familiar than she would expect. “Do you want to wait for me to be done tonight? My father has left town and you can stay in the morning this time.”

She searched this woman’s eyes and blinked, processing only snippets of a time with the lady’s lips against her own, faded wisps of the memory of her green dress on some wooden floor somewhere. The when of it was not coming back to her. She tried to remember how many more of these encounters she had had, and with whom. “Yes, I’ll wait,” she agreed, and sealed it with a kiss that the woman returned eagerly.

 

Sometimes she would wake up in a maiden’s bed; a few times in a pirate ship at the docks with some dreamy-eyed man sweet-talking about how he could take her anywhere she wanted; sometimes alone in her castle; sometimes in the middle of the woods. She sometimes remembered the nights before, which occasionally included laying with strangers but also involved deluded half-sleepwalking out of her own castle on nights where she went nowhere near the tavern. Her first instinct when she woke up would always be to check for the bottle of curse, which was continually secured in her satchel. Being a dragon meant she had always been able to rely upon her sense of direction, but now she spent entire days and nights wandering, unsure of how to get home. Some nights she would hover near a tree trunk against the rain, shooting curse, hoping her feral-lady demeanor would drive any passersby away.

One morning she woke up against a tree trunk to the sensation of her unicorn friend licking her face. She half-smiled at him. She wondered how he had found her, and imagined it was because he had begun to be familiar with her smell, which she knew was not always a good one. Even when she wanted to bathe, she could only add water to her bathtub if her magic did not fail her.

He kneeled before her, a gesture for her to get on. She used all of the strength in her body to climb on top of him, and he carefully, as if aware of her fragile state, trotted in what she assumed was the direction of her castle. She was too inebriated to take in her surroundings, but she had the sense that they were very far from home and marveled again at his ability to find her. “You’re like a fairy godmother here to rescue me,” she said to him. “But you’re my dark magic fairy, so I’m going to call you Diablo. Do you like that name?” She was aware he could not understand her, but she clung tighter to him in a thankful hug.

When he came to her doorstep and kneeled for her to climb down, she let him and herself inside and tried to think through her haze. Food, a bath. She wanted to do those things even though she felt the lure of shooting more curse, and she pricked her finger, sitting down in her armchair.

After eating three apples that Diablo brought her, she went upstairs to draw a bath. Water conjuring was rudimentary magic, and she hoped she would not fail this time. She channeled as much concentration as she could into filling the tub with water, and sighed in relief when a drop of water appeared and grew and grew. She saw the steam and slipped gratefully out of her dirty forest dress.

Her bath gave her a sense of rejuvenation, and when she emerged, she shifted through her clothing on her bed. She hit something bulky and firm under her covers, tucked beneath the massive pile. She pushed the clothing to the side and tugged at the bedding.

Laying in her bed, nestled beneath the blankets, was an egg. It was large, just the size to cradle with both arms, and the color of an acorn. The design all over its surface was intricate, scales with swirls similar to a tail – just like her own tail. This was a dragon egg, the first she had ever seen, but it was strikingly beautiful and it was unmistakable.

Standing nude in her room, she wished deeply that she did not have sleeping curse coursing through her veins, blurring her thinking, so that she could wrap her mind around what it meant that there was a dragon egg nestled in her bed. But she knew, as soon as she saw it. That it belonged to her. Her heart swelled as the call to protect it settled within her. She reached out and touched it, feeling the grooves against her rough fingertips. It was not warm enough. She did not know how she knew, but the instinct in her told her to get it warmer. She climbed into the bed and nudged herself closer to the egg, pulling the covers over the two of them. Later she would put more attention into her confusion and shock, her sense of wonder. But for now she just wanted to protect this precious thing. She wrapped her arms around it, curling herself close, hoping her shaking body would be enough to keep it warm.

 

The hours she spent sleeping gave her just enough distance from her last hit of curse to think about what she had discovered.

She had not been able to do more than elementary magic, but she had apparently accessed her dragon body. She began to shape something akin to a memory of lumbering through her castle in dragon form some time ago. She would have laid the egg then, but could not remember how long ago this was, how long her egg had been tucked into a bed she never slept in anymore.

She began to contend with the scale of her ignorance, the degree to which she did not understand the mystery of her own body. As a girl, the fairies had explained to her the concept of bleeding under the moon, and when it began to happen to her, she understood that it meant she could grow a baby inside her. But it seemed she could also create one in an egg. Where had she herself come from? Her mother had never discussed whether she had been birthed or hatched.

Now these mysteries occupied her thoughts as she moved her fingers over the egg’s surface. Was the father a dragon? A human? She had done a lot of things she did not remember, and the fact of this began to make her feel sickly vulnerable and exposed. She remembered the occasions at the tavern where she had taken some man or another up on his propositions, but she would not even remember them if she saw them again.

Still in bed, clinging dearly to the egg, she began to cry silently. She wished Regina were here. She wished she had never heard of curse, and never reacted so destructively to having her heart broken. But more than that, she began to formulate a wish for the future: That she could come back from this chaos so that when her baby emerged, she would be ready for her. She had not planned for this, and felt the shame of her confusion weighing heavily upon her, but she knew she wanted more than anything the chance to make this better. She hoped for the chance to be a good mother.

 

She did not think of Diablo as someone whose job it was to carry her around, but she urgently needed food and supplies including fire, could not conjure these things, and did not trust her own curse-weakened muscles to take her to the town square and back. Diablo allowed her, in his agreeable way, to climb onto his back, and they headed to the market.

There was a solemnity that she did not expect as the people gathered, picking out fruit and jewelry and talking quietly.

“The queen has been plotting something terrible ever since the day she ruined Snow White’s wedding,” she overheard.

“She promised to destroy everyone’s happiness.”

“Now there are rumors of a dark curse and they say she is going to use it to harm us all.”

She was thanking the flint and steel seller when she heard the last comment, and she froze, chilled as she realized what this meant.

Regina had talked of the dark curse. It was something Rumplestiltskin had tried to tempt her with, but Regina knew it would require the heart of the thing she loved most. Regina had loved Maleficent most, and this was what stopped her, what had in fact made her place the dark curse in Maleficent’s hands and tell her to hide it away from Rumplestiltskin. But now, even if Regina had the curse, which she did not, what would she sacrifice? Her father was closest to her. But she wondered if Regina loved anyone anymore. If she did, surely she would not hurt them. She had once believed that.

Back at home, she sat in front of the fire, shaking, staring at the sleeping curse in her hands. She considered that perhaps she could just use the rest, and then not make more when it ran out. She gauged that there was a week’s worth of solution still in the bottle. She could do that, right? She could build up to quitting, and then she’d be ready when it was empty. She felt her breathing quicken at even the notion of going without it. She was not going to hurt anyone if she kept it for another week.

Except she did not know at all when her baby was coming. Would there be signs? Dragons were not usually very social except with family, and they were not very common, so she was used to being alone. But she wished she had help, answers to even simple questions. She wished she wasn’t the only person she knew who had ever gone through this. And she knew that if she was going to make up for this hindrance and be ready when her little one arrived, she could not delay. She could give her time to curse, or to her baby.

She felt her tears stream down her face as she sat in front of the fireplace. Destroying this substance felt like it might shatter her. She tried to be rational. She had done so many things lately that felt like wrong decisions and actually were, so she told herself to do something distressing that would help her. She squeezed her eyes shut, summoning whatever strength was left in her that had not been siphoned by this poison. She opened her eyes, focusing on the flames, and she tossed the bottle of curse into the fire. She watched it burn with an ache in her heart, but also a sense of relief. It was true that she could make more, but as she sat with the sense of liberation in her heart over her first accomplishment in being the person her baby would need, she had a confident feeling that she could triumph over this.

 

Maleficent wailed in misery, vomiting into the basin on her kitchen floor as her sweat-drenched body shook unremittingly. She curled into a ball and cried, taking shaky breaths. Diablo licked her forehead comfortingly. Although his saliva was cooling for just a moment, it warmed upon her skin and she realized how burningly hot her body was. “Diablo, I’m going to die if I don’t cool down,” she moaned. The heat radiated from her chest, from her skin, in the dry thirst of her throat. Ever since she threw the curse out she had been on edge, her nerves rubbed raw by every creak of wind against the windows that made her think of dragon slayers, or waking up over and over through the night to be sure her baby had not suddenly been born. She dreamed, night after night, of the baby crying for her. The anxiety was consuming her, and she knew it was not rational, that it was a side effect of withdrawal. But this time she was certain that her body, capable of creating fire, would heat to combustion if she allowed herself to languish sweating on the floor.

Outside the snow was ankle-deep going by her view through the window, and the snowflakes continued to fall. If she could crawl out into the snow, she could cool herself. The problem was that everything in her body felt broken. She had spent hours, day after day, crying through the pain that had settled into the core of her bones, her stomach, her heart, her toes, her teeth, her brain. It was getting worse each day. When she went off of curse the first time years ago, it was so gradual that while she had felt its effects, they had been tempered. Now, her body was turning against her in the worst ways.

She lay on the kitchen floor and looked at the doors all the way on the other side of the castle. She tried to worm herself closer to it, then realized this was tremendously more effort than crawling. She got on one knee and then another, and she slowly crawled her way toward the doors in the living room.

The fireplace blazed, and her egg was wrapped in a warm blanket a safe distance away on the armchair. She crawled past the fire, and its heat seeping into her already overheated body caused her to whimper and slow down, falling onto the floor again. Determined, she got up and kept crawling, feeling sweat drip beneath her.

By the time she got to the front doors, she was sure she did not have the strength to actually get through them, but she reminded herself that her body was not as broken as it felt, and moaned as she reached through her pain to one of the double doors and opened it. She crawled outside, and rolled into the snow onto her back.

She groaned in a primal relief. The icy cold against her body felt miraculous. She saw that snow was blowing in through the opened door and, for the baby’s sake, gathered the strength to kick it closed. She laid in the soothing snow for another minute before the cold began to feel dangerous against her skin. Heaving herself back into a crawl, she let herself in the door and closed it behind her. She sat against the doors and breathed air shakily into her labored lungs. “I can do this,” she gasped. She looked to the egg on the armchair. “I can do this for you.”

 

As it turned out, that night was the worst of her body’s rage against her. The following day she conjured porridge and ate it with slow caution. She was not confident she could keep it down, but she learned that if she stayed at her table as still as her trembling body would allow, with her head down in her arms, she could manage her nausea. In the days after that her shaking and sweating began to wane. Her body aches were taking time, but they were getting better as well.

Each day she tried out simple magic: she had to space out her attempts, but she would try at least once to light the fireplace, to draw water for a bath, to materialize food items, and to straighten up disheveled things around the house. She would try, and then she would stagger onto a couch or a warm space on the floor and rest. Her powers became increasingly reliable at procuring water and food, the two easiest and most important. She continued to use flint and steel for the fireplace. The house remained a mess, which she hated. She wanted to prepare, make everything perfect for the baby. She did not have a lot of things from her childhood, but she remembered her favorite toy, a rattle shaped like a dragon foot holding a cosmically purple ball. She put too much energy into trying to climb the stairs, but she could not resist the excitement of having the rattle ready. She was able to make it to the attic and spent some time searching, but when she found it her heart swelled with the image of her little one playing with this thing that would become their family heirloom.

The most precious accomplishment however, did not come from her, but from the egg she was keeping warm and safe. She would sit in her chair and tell it stories, talk soothingly about faraway lands and the princesses who fell in love with dragons there. She would talk about her mother, spinning a verbal memoir about their days playing in the forest. She would softly sing nursery rhymes. And when she did these things, she would feel a flutter within the egg, as if her sweet child were responding to her voice. The baby was kicking. She cried whenever it happened, a smile on her face. She knew that it was going to be however long until her baby arrived, but the child was also here now, interacting with her, being her hope for the future. Her baby was real.

She could not know for sure, but she began to believe that the baby would be a girl, and she decided on the name Lilith. Lily for the white snow that had saved her, and which fell all around her castle as she huddled inside to spend time at the fireplace with the egg.

And then one night, as she sat in her armchair by the fire with Diablo and hummed to Lily in her arms, Regina materialized before her.

She gawked up in surprise. “Regina.”

Regina gave her an unsettling smile. “Nice to see you, dear. I would love to stay and catch up but all I want is the dark curse.”

Maleficent’s eyes averted subtly to her staff in the corner, close to the fireplace. “You aren’t getting that.”

“ _Oh_ ,” Regina said, with feigned cordiality. “You’re worried that it would result in me killing you. Don’t worry, I would never hurt you… you’re not that important to me.” Her eyes went to the egg, registering it for the first time. “What is that?”

Maleficent resisted the urge to use her body to shield her egg, which would just draw Regina’s attention to it. “It doesn’t concern you,” she said with cold poise.

“Then why are you cradling it in a blanket like a baby?” Regina’s expression turned to curious, surprised astonishment. “Is this… are you having a _baby_?”

She had come to believe Regina. That she didn’t love her anymore. But she saw Regina’s mask fall as she encountered this new information, as Regina’s face shifted into a betrayed hurt.

“It has been approximately how long since our relationship ended and you’re having a baby with someone?!”

Now she did put the egg behind her on the chair. “I won’t let you hurt this baby, Regina. Be angry that I did this, that it’s so soon after you left me. But please have some perspective and do not direct it at my unborn child.”

“You’re right. I am angry with you. I came here to see you, to see that you’re well. I came to tell you that when the curse hits and you are in this new world, you will have...” her voice softened. “You would have had comfort.”

Maleficent held her gaze.

“But I’m glad I’ve seen what you’ve done. You obviously don’t need me.”

“You know that you are capable of being happy here in this world. So choose it. If you enact this curse, it will take a terrible toll on you, leaving you empty inside. Don’t do this to us all,” Maleficent begged. “Don’t do this to innocent people.”

“You’re asking _me_ not to hurt _you_? How ironic,” Regina spat. “Who are you making this child with?”

“It doesn’t matter. He’s not around. What matters is that I give my baby her best chance, and you will not ruin that.”

This was the point where each of the dozen spears in the room began to hover, summoning behind Regina. Without thinking about it, Maleficent grabbed Lily and channeled her energy into poofing herself, her baby, and Diablo away. But she could not even light a fireplace. Dematerializing was beyond her. Weak smoke surrounded her, then waned.

Regina eyed her questioningly, but was focused on her own mission. Every pointed blade unified in direction toward Diablo, who whinnied in fear.

“No!” Maleficent begged.

“Then give me what I want.”

Regina followed her gaze to the staff, and marched over to it, dropping the weapons from mid-air to collapse to the floor with a jarring clang. She smashed the staff’s glass orb into the ground, and the scroll for the dark curse burst free. “I shall destroy Snow White if it is the last thing I do, and I no longer care what it does to you,” she said. She added the resentful taunt, “Good luck with your baby,” and vanished in smoke.

 

There was nothing left to do but await the dark curse’s arrival. She did not know what preparations Regina was gathering, but days and then weeks passed, and the curse did not come.

This winter was colder than ever and wood burned so quickly. She needed coal for herself and Lily. She tucked Lily into the bed, cozy beneath layers of blankets, then went with Diablo to the town market. On her way there, she could picture the conversations that would take place and preemptively blamed herself. She had failed to keep the dark curse away from Regina. She could have stopped this.

The market was nearly deserted. Only a few vendors and townspeople were there, and when she inquired why, they said that everyone was hiding, awaiting the queen’s curse. The queen was hell bent on destroying the royal couple and their baby-to-be. Seeing people too afraid to gather was worse than the gossip. She returned empty handed, as the coal peddler was nowhere to be found.

The first thing she noticed upon approaching her fortress in the dark of night was that the doors were opened. She had not accidentally done this since her worst days of addiction. Normally she would be confused but not afraid. Except for one brave woman years ago seeking a teacher and meaning her no harm, no one dared to just stroll into a dragon’s lair and no one would survive a threat against her.

But that was before. As she approached the house, she walked as fast as she could and dragged herself up the steps to her room.

Instead of finding the quiet reassurance of her egg tucked into the bed, she entered to see Snow White and the prince. Snow White was heavily pregnant and clutched Lily in her arms. They were bundled in furs and armed with swords, and their faces -she realized with a sickening dawning- held ruthless determination. “The sorcerer’s apprentice told us we would find this here,” Snow White declared, gesturing with her eyes to the egg.

The prince drew his sword. “Get out of our way.”

“What kind of people are you,” Maleficent asked, “threatening a child?”

Snow White sneered. "Child? This isn't a child. This will become a monster just like you." She moved toward Maleficent, toward the bedroom door.

"And what are you?" Maleficent held her ground, but the prince’s sword touched her throat and shoved her to the side, where she fell. She called after them as they marched past her, "Please. Please have mercy. I can't lose my child."

Snow White gazed upon her with empty emotion, and turned to march down the stairs.

On his way out, the prince stepped callously upon the rattle and plodded past its broken pieces.

On the floor, Maleficent roared in anguish and put her whole entire soul into taking on her dragon form, bringing life in her mind to the moment when she would take her baby back and then scorch these people to the ground. Charcoal-colored smoke surrounded her, but dissipated as quickly as the sight of Snow White and her prince down the stairs with her precious Lily.

Her failed transformation took every measure of energy she had. She tried to stand to chase the couple, and collapsed. She sat crying, horrified at herself for her weakness. She had done this. She had failed to protect her baby because of her own weak choices. The dreading in her soul told her that she would never see this egg again, would never meet her baby. The colossal nature of her even deeper mistake began to sink in. Snow White was a true villain. She should have believed Regina and helped her kill this monster years ago.

Regina had been right all along.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sexual consent issues.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See the end note for a content warning.

She cried through the rest of the night, alone in her bed without her egg to hold close. She spent the following day trying to reach Regina through the mirrors that they had once used all the time in the height of their feelings for each other. Her enchanted mirror was a small handheld item with intricate silver floral designs on the handle. She knew that Regina was fixated enough with mirrors that she had enchanted all of the ones in her castle, and if she was near any of them she would hear.

Regina had not hurt her or Lily. She had been angry, but Maleficent had seen why: Because she still loved her. Now, that made her Maleficent’s best chance at getting Lily back.

“Regina,” she called through the mirror. “I need you to listen to me. Something terrible has happened and I need you.”

But now she began to wonder if Regina could hear her, or if her magic was faltering even on this.

“I was wrong,” she said. “I was wrong about Snow White and I want to help you.”

If Regina could hear her, she did not answer.

“Regina, please,” she cried. “Please come back.”

The worst feeling as she sat in her potions room in the total silence was not knowing if it was Regina or her own weakness turning against her.

 

By night she had enough strength to go to the tavern. She waved to her favorite lady who sat in her green dress on the platform. Once it was her break, the songstress approached and planted a kiss to Maleficent’s cheek. “You haven’t been here in a while.”

“Ursula, I need your help,” she said. “You work here almost every night. You know all of the gossip. What are people saying about Snow White and the prince?”

Ursula sat beside her on a stool at the bar. “Everyone is afraid of the dark curse.” The bartender set a beer before her, and she chugged some of it. “That’s why the bar is fuller tonight than usual. We’re nursing our misery.”

“But what is the royal couple doing about it? Are they perhaps enacting some kind of counter-curse?”

Ursula shook her head. “Not that I have heard. Why?”

Maleficent tried to stay composed, thinking of all the ways they could hurt Lily. “There are a lot of spells that someone might try to use… spells that involve the blood of dragons.”

Ursula’s eyes widened. “Oh no, our prince and princess would never hurt you or anyone. Where would such an idea even come from?”

“You don’t know that. None of us know them.”

“But still, I would never even consider the idea and now, twice in a day? I saw a child in the village just get scolded and dragged home earlier for suggesting something similar.”

“What did the child say?”

“Well no one is taking it seriously. It was just the ramblings of a little boy.” Ursula sipped her pint of beer.

“Just tell me what he said,” she begged.

“I think he was just excited he thought he saw the royals. He was shouting to the people in general. He said he was hiding in the bushes last night and saw Snow White and the prince with an old man, and the three of them sent a giant egg through a portal to another world. I heard him say that the egg cracked open just beforehand and that there was a baby inside who cried. Obviously the boy is unwell.”

“Oh my goodness,” she gasped. “That was my baby. That was my baby.”

“What?”

She placed her head on the bar counter and breathed, heaving as her tears fell. She felt Ursula’s hand touch her shoulder. “They stole my baby.” She continued to sob against the countertop, trying to understand how this could have happened, _why_ they would do this. She sat up. “Do you know where the boy’s family lives? I have to go find him. I have to go find him right now. Maybe he’ll know something that can help me follow my baby. I need to know who the man was that accompanied the royals. Did he say the man was some kind of apprentice?”

“I don’t know the family or where they live and I have to say I’m confused by this talk of a baby. You’re acting a bit strange.”

She took a deep breath, trying to compose herself. “I’m not acting strange - I’m acting like myself for once. I’m recovering from an addiction. There was a certain terrible substance and I used it all the time. This is the first time you’re seeing me without it.”

Ursula breathed sharply. “Really?”

Maleficent nodded.

Ursula wrung her hands together in nervousness. “I couldn’t tell. Did I- did I take advantage of you?”

“No.” She took Ursula’s hand. “I never drank more than what anyone else was having, and you couldn’t be expected to know that it was mixed with something else. I’m sure everyone thought I was just very outgoing. I was probably still a mess but I think I was good at seeming like that was just who I was, that I could make my own decisions about who to sleep with. But I do remember your consideration of me and whether I was okay, when I went home with you. I don’t know if everyone was that way. I have gaps in my memory. And now I have a baby. I already love her so much, Ursula, and she’s been banished.” She began again to cry.

All she had wanted was to hold this child close and safe. Lily would have been born into her arms _last night_ and now she didn’t know if her baby was alive.

“I’m so sorry. I wish I could help you remember,” Ursula said. “And I don’t know anything else about what might’ve happened to your baby. I’m horrified by the prince and princess’s deeds. I feel awful for you.”

“You’ve helped so much already,” she said. “You’ve given me clues I can follow, and you’ve believed me about the kidnapping. I don’t know a lot of people who would do that in a kingdom where people do not question the princess.”

“I want to help you find the boy,” Ursula said. “But people are afraid, hiding. You will wake townspeople and garner suspicion and resentment if you go right now. They won’t help you. I know it is hard to hear, but you must wait until morning.”

Maleficent nodded solemnly. “I think you’re right. I just want to do the most sure thing to help my baby. I’m going to go home, and come to the village in a few hours when the sun is up.”

“You seem like you’d benefit from not being alone tonight,” Ursula said. “Do you want some company? We can simply talk.”

She nodded, and Ursula gave her the most comforting hug she had known in a very long while.

Ursula left work early and walked with her back to the castle. Inside, they sat by the fireplace and talked about the things they wished for in the core of their hearts now that they were facing the uncertainty of the dark curse. Maleficent knew that there were many worlds, and that Lily might not be in the one the curse would send them to. She knew that even if they ended up in the same place she may never find her little girl. She didn’t even know with certainty that her baby was a girl.

Ursula had fought with her father about the best way to spread her mother’s gift of music. He wanted her to sing sailors to their death. She wanted to sing them to their inner peace, to their best selves. Her father had declared her naïve and had severed ties, had gone back to live in the ocean. She had tried to ignore how much she missed him, drowning herself in the drinking, revelry, and pretty women at the tavern. But she just wanted him back. Knowing that Ursula too had experienced a lost loved one did not make her feel better, but it did make her feel closer to being understood.

And then through the window in the distance they saw the smoke, and they knew it was the dark curse. The sinister cloud overtook everything in its path. She and Ursula sat by the fire next to Diablo, holding hands and hoping that whatever this was would come to be broken someday. They closed their eyes under the fog.

 

She started coming regularly to the library trips, where she would settle with Regina in what was now established as their usual spot adjacent to the kids’ section. Today, some other kids were playing there, and Roland had joined them in acting out their games as they strew books around.

“I have a question,” Regina asked.

“Yes?”

“Why doesn’t Lily ever come around for dinner?”

“Many reasons. Dragons are very solitary except for family. Other people have always been hard for her, and especially now because she’s not quite used to the strangeness of this town… Also, like me, she does not want to encounter the so-called Charmings.”

“I understand that,” Regina said. “She’s being told they’ve changed, but it’s hard to accept.”

“I don’t like them,” Maleficent said bluntly. “But I understand that they’re your son’s grandparents.”

Regina cast her gaze down. “I’m sorry for how they hurt you.”

“They didn’t simply hurt me,” Maleficent said. “It’s not like they were mean to me at the ball. They destroyed my baby’s life. They ruined her childhood. And they cursed her.”

Regina looked at her now with sympathy. “For the record, I know they have plans and are not coming at all next week, if Lily wants to come over. And I know what it feels like to see them that way. But I have also come to realize how much of the town has seen me that way. I ruined things for most people in the town. And yet… they give me kindness. They have given me trust. _You_ have given me trust and forgiveness for the ways that I hurt you. How?”

“Because I know you,” Maleficent said. “I know what made you do those things, and it is the same thing that makes me know that you’re different. I loved you then, and it has not changed.”

“I have a confession. I sometimes think about our past relationship, and I miss it. It was the stupidest thing I’ve ever done, to turn against you. I was convinced that I was right about something that was not true, because after the dark curse I saw that you were right – I didn’t find happiness. That only happened when I adopted Henry.”

“Children can bring us so much.”

“Yes. I have Henry, and now I have chosen to raise Roland. But it _is_ because I just buried Robin. I want to keep you close, but my feelings for you confuse me.”

She held her hand out to Regina, who took it. “It was the most important relationship of my life. And now after so much has changed we can redefine it. I don’t expect you to come back to me. I just want to keep you close too.”

They both nodded at each other.

 “I made flyers!” a chipper voice announced, and they looked up at Belle’s bright smile and bursting energy. She handed them each a sheet of paper that said _Storybrooke Youth Theater Troupe_. It had an image of the library with its clock tower on it, and listed when the children would meet. “I know that things are moving quickly, but there’s been so much positive feedback,” Belle said. She handed two more flyers to Regina. “Can you give these to Henry and Violet?”

“Sure,” Regina said, looking over the details. “I’ll let them know. But Henry has started this creative writing club after school and Violet has joined. Roland won’t be able to make it because I have late mayoral meetings on Thursdays and that is when I leave him with Zelena.”

“Can’t Zelena bring him?” Belle asked.

“She has a newborn so I doubt she wants to spend two hours a day trying to care for her in a library theater. And he is too little to drop off and come back for, especially with him going through so much lately. I want someone in the family to be there with him.”

“If Roland is comfortable having me bring him, I would like to help,” Maleficent offered. “I can tell how good this will be for him. Look how well he gets along with other children.”

They watched as Roland and another little boy chattered over a book together.

“Well it’s settled,” Regina said. “Mal, I appreciate it.”

“No problem,” she said. She thought only later about what Regina had said about family, and how quickly she had been to trust and include her.

 

Belle was having a handful of a time trying to organize the children, who were all different ages and who were chattering and running around the library theater. “I thought we would begin by playing something I read about called improv,” Belle explained to the kids. “Can I have two volunteers?”

Maleficent sat in the audience with Roland, a few parents, and the several dozen children. Most people had simply dropped their kids off and kept going, and other older kids had shown up on their own. She recognized some of the attendees from going about town. Cinderella was there with her toddler, and so was the father of Nicholas and Ava.

“I want to volunteer,” a girl of roughly thirteen said, and stood to join Belle in front of them.

“Perfect. Introduce yourself to everyone,” Belle instructed.

“I’m Grace,” she said with a beam at her father in the back.

“Okay, and who else would like to volunteer?”

To Maleficent’s surprise, Roland shyly tapped her and said, “Can I go up there?”

“Of course,” she said, impressed. She had not seen him as particularly outgoing but he held the bubbliest smile. “Belle? Roland volunteers,” she called.

Belle beckoned Roland up and placed him about five feet away from Grace, facing the audience. “Tell everyone your name, sweetie.”

“Roland,” he said quietly, but with a smile.

“You and Grace are going to act out a scene, okay?”

He nodded.

Belle turned to the audience. “Let’s find one object in the room that we can use as a prop. What would you all like to use?”

The kids looked around the room, and Grace perked up as she looked into the audience. “There are playing cards!” Grace suggested. “How about a card?”

A child in the crowd handed a deck of cards over to the front, and Belle took it and selected one card from the deck. “Okay,” Belle said. “Here is the queen of hearts. And now we need a conflict, something that one person wants and the other one doesn’t. What should we have them do with the card?”

A voice called out, “One person will steal it.”

They all shouted their approval.

“Okay Roland, you’re going to try to steal this card from Grace.” She handed the card to Grace, who put it in her pocket. “But I have a challenge for you. You have to play-act, so you have to pretend that you’re best friends.”

Mal watched with mirth as the stage was set, but questioned Belle’s judgment in giving the smaller child the more complicated role.

“Do you understand your job, Roland? To steal the card from Grace while pretending to be her friend?”

He nodded, biting his finger shyly.

“Okay,” Belle said, stepping aside. “Scene.”

Grace stood still and looked at Roland, giggling with unsure awkwardness.

“My best friend, Grace!” Roland exclaimed, and ran to hug her. He came up perhaps to her belly button, and put both of his arms around her tightly. Maleficent closely watched both of his hands, which clung to her, and then he pulled away. “I missed you!”

“I missed you too!” she said. “You grew!”

He smiled. “My papa always said I will be as tall as him someday.”

“And as kind and valiant,” Grace complimented.

“I would like to inquire. Did you come here in a carriage with your handmaiden?”

Maleficent, delightfully floored, could not imagine how he had come to put those words together in such a sentence. She leaned in closer along with the rest of the audience.

“Um…” Grace laughed.

“Always play along. Say yes!” Belle stage whispered from the side.

“Why yes, that was my handmaiden,” she said.

“I believe I saw her calling for you as she struggled to contain your horses.”

Grace, bewildered but committed, looked behind her shoulder and said, “Okay, well… I will go find my handmaiden then. Good day young sir.” She walked off the stage, leaving Roland to face the audience. He began to run toward Maleficent as everyone clapped with a murmur of amused confusion, but Belle beckoned him to stay onstage.

 “That was really creative,” Belle said, kneeling to be at his level. “I have to know where this dialogue came from. But also, sweetie, you didn’t take the card.”

Roland reached into his own pocket. From the moment the card began to emerge, the audience broke into gasps and amazed chattering.

Maleficent put her hands to her mouth, smiling in delight.

“That was incredible. Take a bow, Roland and Grace.”

Grace came to join Roland’s hand, and they both bowed while the kids before them clapped.

 

When she brought Roland back later, Regina was in the kitchen starting dinner, and Roland was bubbling to tell her about his experience.

“Regina! I got to go up in front of everyone! I was in the front and we did pretend. And the lady said it was incredible because I got the card from the girl. It was fun! Can I go back next time?”

“It sounds like it was a great time,” Regina said putting her kitchen knife down and giving him a hug. “And of course you can go back. Anything for those dimples.” She gave him a smothering forehead kiss, and his smile brightened.

“I’m gonna go tell Henry,” Roland said, and rushed out of the kitchen.

Maleficent watched him bound away and then turned to Regina. “He did not fully convey to you how much he astounded everyone. Belle had him and a girl improvise a scene where his goal was to steal a playing card, and Roland stole it from the girl’s pocket without even touching it. I mean, he hugged her briefly, but I was watching and I promise you he didn’t do more than brush the outside of her dress. And he had an entire story made up, like an excuse to distract her in the end. It wasn’t just his use of magic. This was a room full of children who know about magic, knew exactly what town they were in, but they were impressed because he was so charming and committed.”

 “You’re saying he did magic?” Regina asked skeptically.

 “Yes, are you not teaching him?”

Regina’s expression warmed even more with dawning. “You said he was told to steal the card?”

“Yes, that was their prompt.”

“He was copying his father,” she said, with touched realization in her voice. “Robin used to rob the rich and give to the poor. I don’t think Roland knows magic at all. I think he took the slyest tricks of Robin’s craft and used them on stage today.” Regina smiled with amusement, and Maleficent noticed her eyes begin to water. “I never expected to be standing here so proud, crying about the fact that my child is a prodigy at banditry against royals and the like.”

Maleficent waited, curious to see if Regina would comment on the poignancy of what she said. When Regina did not elaborate, Mal said, “It’s sweet to see you embracing the idea. That he is your child.”

Regina looked at her in pleased surprise. “I… I don’t think I’ve ever said that before.”

The doorbell rang.

“Do you mind getting the door?” Regina asked. “I’m guessing it’s a surprise dinner guest, maybe Violet.”

Maleficent went to the front door and gasped with joy to see Lily on the front step. “You really came!” she exclaimed, pulling her daughter close with a giddy laugh.

“When you said certain people were definitely not coming, I decided to finally give it a try. I knew how much it would mean to you.”

“It does,” Mal said. “I wasn’t sure if you were coming so I didn’t tell Regina, but she’ll be happy.”

They entered the kitchen. Regina saw Lily and broke into a genuine smile with a tinge of surprise. “Lily, it’s so nice to see you here.”

“Hi,” she replied. “It’s cool to be here. I hope you’re okay with the fact that Mom invited me.”

“Of course,” Regina said. “I’ve been telling Mal I wanted to get to know you more.”

“Cool then.” She reached into her bag and pulled out a tin. “I brought herbal apple cider tea. I know mom doesn’t drink alcohol or even caffeine, and you and your family have a thing about apples.” She paused. “Or, is it a negative thing with apples? Do you like apples?”

Regina gave her a reassuring smile. “We do like apples. Thank you.” She punctuated this with an appreciative nod to the tin Lily set on the counter and continued to chop vegetables. “Since it’s herbal it won’t keep the children awake and will be a perfect option for everyone at dinner.”

“When I was little, my adoptive dad would always have a cup of English Breakfast,” Lily said. “I would try to copy him but I would put tons of sugar and lemon in it. He’d love to see me now, working at the tea shop in town and appreciating flavor profiles like a real adult and everything.”

Regina gave Mal a brief glance and then asked Lily, “Your adoptive parents. How have they been ever since you moved to Storybrooke?”

“They’re fine. I’m not that close to them, but they call every now and then. Since I can’t tell them about Storybrooke, they think I’m in New York. They sometimes reference things they know are going on in the city, and I have to look up the news on my phone while I’m talking to them so I can pretend I know what they’re talking about.”

Regina averted her eyes to the onions she was chopping. Mal noticed Regina’s eyes begin to water, and searched Regina’s expression for a clue as to whether this was a culinary or emotional reaction.

“Did you always refer to them as your ‘adoptive dad’ or ‘adoptive mom’?” Regina asked. “I’m just curious. I don’t want to sound like I’m judging that – I just wonder what it is, what a parent does, that makes someone feel like they need that qualifier. Or to feel like they’re not close.”

“ _Oh_ ,” Lily said empathetically. “ _No_. No, Regina, I didn’t mean it to come out like that. I never called them my adoptive parents in conversation like that until I came here. And then it was just in certain cases, like now, to be clear about who I meant in case anyone was confused about my history.”

“Oh,” Regina breathed.

“I’m sure your son wouldn’t talk about you that way.”

“I’m not worried about Henry, it’s just... I don’t know how much your mother told you,” Regina explained. “About Roland. I hope that he’ll adjust and feel like a full part of the family.”

“I’m not close to my adoptive parents because they always made me feel misunderstood and invisible, like I was so wrong and bad all the time, and like I was just plain weird. Not because they adopted me.”

Maleficent had expected politeness and had even hoped they would enjoy each other’s company. She did not expect to be sitting in the kitchen quietly watching Lily and Regina tell their stories like they had always known each other, like they trusted each other instantly. Lily had been spending frequent time with her and, separately, with Emma Swan, but other than that this was the first person she had known Lily to bond with.

“I hope this town has helped with that,” Regina said. “It’s definitely okay to be different here.”

“Tell me about it. The coffee and tea shop is the most unique job I’ve ever had. The other day some guy said ‘surprise me’, so I made him an espresso macchiato which comes in a teensy cup. He accused me of being a witch who was trying to shrink him and ranted about how he was never going back to that annoying place again. And then some scruffy dude talked about how great it was to be allowed to drink coffee because back when he was eight years old last spring, his father forbade him.”

“Welcome to Storybrooke,” Regina said with a laugh.

“I’ve heard that greeting before,” she replied with a smirk. “And don’t worry, I’m almost completely over the whole knife hand stabby thing, especially since that seems to be an ordinary type Storybrooke event.”

“I’m so sorry, Lily,” Regina said with a grave sincerity that did not match Lily’s playful tone.

“It’s okay, really,” Lily said. “You brought me back to my mom. In one piece, might I add, after that whole misunderstanding with Emma. And being here with my mom is the best thing that ever happened to me.”

“ _Really_?” Maleficent asked, stunned, a smile spreading across her face.

Lily tilted her head, like her mother’s surprise was silly to her. “Of course.” She gave a sincere smile. “I guess I’m not good at saying things. But you make me feel understood and validated in a certain way that has helped me a lot. Like with understanding myself as a dragon and how certain things like being more withdrawn are considered valid to our kind.”

“And we’ll keep working on flying,” Maleficent said. “You’ll be great at it someday.”

“I’m terrible at flying,” Lily explained to Regina. “I can’t fly in a straight line to save my life.”

“Not terrible, just unpracticed,” Mal corrected gently.

“I want to come see your flying lessons,” Regina said lightly. “If you feel like it wouldn’t be too much pressure.”

Mal couldn’t help but hear the cheer in her tone and think about their lives all those years ago.

“I’m fine with it if my mom is.”

Maleficent nodded and shared a look with Regina. “We’d be thrilled for you to come along.” She blushed, remembering the feeling of freedom against the wind with Regina holding her close.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The consent issues from the previous chapter are discussed here. I don't think of what happened as Ursula's fault and don't think Mal would either, and that was what made me shape the conversation in that way. But I want to acknowledge that it was not appropriate consent on either of their parts.


	5. Chapter 5

In theater club the following week, Belle had the kids take turns onstage and play a game where someone would stand before the rest of the children and deliver a single line over and over, but with a change each time in the emotion behind it.

“Surprise,” Belle directed.

Grace held both palms to her cheeks, her eyes widened. “I can’t believe I’m seeing you here again!” she exclaimed into the audience.

“Let’s try anger,” Belle suggested next.

Grace jumped up and down, stomping. “I can’t believe I’m seeing you here again!” she shrieked, shaking her fist dramatically in the air.

Belle’s cell phone rang, and she said, “I must take this, but continue to practice.” She looked apologetically to Mal. “Can you please take charge while I answer this?”

Maleficent gave a good-natured nod.

“Everyone listen to Ms. Maleficent,” Belle directed them, and hurried out of the room.

Maleficent had been content to just let Belle and the children play out their acting session however they wanted, but now that she was momentarily in charge she decided to try applying her mental notes. Roland was leaning close, clinging to her waist as they sat, but he let go when she made her way to the front of the group, closer to where all the children could see her just offstage. “I need someone to stand up there with Grace. You don’t have to necessarily talk. Who wants to volunteer?”

A girl named Ava got up and took a spot onstage opposite Grace with no prompting. “I’m Ava,” she said to everyone, with a cutesy bow.

“Thank you, Ava,” Mal said. “Now let’s focus on Grace for a moment. Grace, tell us a story. What is a time that you were really angry at someone?”

Grace looked up at the ceiling. After a pause, she said, “One time this girl I thought was my friend was making fun of me.”

“I’m sorry,” Maleficent said. “Do you want to say what happened?”

“Yeah,” Grace said. “She said my papa didn’t love me.”

The few kids who were chattering quieted and everyone’s eyes directed to Jefferson in the back of the room. Jefferson leaned, put his hand in his chin in a melancholy thinking pose, but remained composed.

“She said that if he loved me, he would not have followed the queen and disappeared forever. Her parents were my neighbors and they came to get me when I was alone in the Enchanted Forest, but she made me feel bad for no reason. I didn’t even do anything to her.”

Maleficent had assumed that Grace would talk about something like a time a cousin wore her favorite dress. She did not expect this, but realized that Grace, standing before them all and volunteering this story, was perhaps less uncomfortable than she was. She took this as a cue to press further. “When she said that, what did you want to do to her?”

“I wanted to hit her. But my papa taught me better. I knew he would find out and be disappointed when he came back.”

“Okay dear,” she said. “I want you to think about what you felt in that moment. Think about your pain, and your anger. Think about how much you _wanted_ to hit her. Just stand there for a moment and feel that feeling. Focus.”

Everyone watched Grace, who stood on the stage, focused.

“Now turn to Ava. Ava is not that girl, and don’t picture that she is playing that girl. But in this scene she’s just as terrible, has made you just as angry. I want you to say the line: ‘I can’t believe I’m seeing you here again.’ But say it while channeling all of the emotions you felt at that moment with that mean girl. Take your time. Whenever you’re ready.”

Grace turned to Ava and held her gaze in a hard, fixed stare. Grace’s shoulders raised slightly. She breathed silently, deeply. Her energy, her anger, was barely concealed in the slight clench of her fingertips, her blinking, her slightly shaking lip. With controlled, heavy rage in the gravelly tone of her voice, she said, “I can’t believe I’m seeing you here again.”

The room was silent for a moment. Maleficent was so struck by the believability that she was momentarily speechless. “That was excellent,” she finally remarked. The children gave solemn applause. They were not cheering, but she watched their faces and knew they were too held by the emotion of the moment to react in a cheerful way.

“That _was_ excellent,” Belle chimed in from the back of the room. “And it looks like that’s our time tonight, so be safe getting home, and remember to read the scenes we’ll be doing next time. And if your parents dropped you off, remember not to leave until they get here.”

Roland reattached himself to Mal’s skirt, and she held her arm around him as she walked over to Grace and Jefferson. “Brilliant job up there,” she said to Grace. Looking to each of them, she said, “I’m sorry if that was too much.”

“I didn’t know it happened,” Jefferson said.

“It’s okay, Papa,” Grace assured him. “We talked about these things.”

“I know,” he said. “I just didn’t know theater club was going to be full of so many emotions.”

“I was fine,” Grace insisted.

“Your daughter is a natural star and I can tell she’s a happy person,” Mal added. She stroked Roland’s head protectively. “This town has a strangely high amount of orphans. I was one. And I know that you being here for her is so important. I admire how you always make time for Grace.”

“My condolences. And the same for you with Roland. He’s a sweet kid. Very smart and talented. He’s lucky to have you and Regina.” He smiled kindly at the boy.

“Thank you. I’ll pass it on to Regina.”

 She supposed there was something strange about her accepting the compliment on behalf of Regina, who herself did not necessarily raise Roland until now and would thus have accepted it for Robin. Rather than feeling peculiar, she realized it made her feel included in the most positive way possible under the circumstances.

“But just to be clear, there’s no… ‘me and Regina’. If that’s what you meant. I just like to help, and Roland is a delight.” She touched his nose playfully, and he smiled blithely and hugged her closer.

Jefferson tilted his head. “Sorry, I’ve seen the two of you out and about, like at the coffeeshop, and.... I got things mixed up.”

“She’s a close friend,” Maleficent assured him cordially.

“Well you have a very cute friendship. After years of making hats, I can recognize instantly when something holds magic, and I can tell you that your friendship is certainly magic. You should cling tight to that friendship.”

At this point she was aware that he was being ironic in his overuse of the word friendship, and tried not to laugh. “Sure.”

“Maleficent!” Belle stepped into the conversation and smiled an acknowledgement to Jefferson. To Mal, she said, “When you get a minute, I have a question.”

Jefferson and Grace excused themselves, giving Belle Mal’s full attention.

“I wanted to say that your coaching was amazing. You’re years ahead of me. How do you know how to teach acting?”

Mal smiled graciously. “I have no experience with acting. But I know emotions and I know how to teach them, to get people to access and wield them with precision. It’s the most fundamental part of teaching magic.”

“Well I saw magic onstage and I don’t want to ever lose that. I know you’re somewhat new in town so I’m unsure of what other potential jobs you might be looking at, but we have room in the budget and I would love to pay you to be the head of this program. You would be the Storybrooke Youth Theater Troupe Director and have complete control. I always wanted the kids to have this space but I never saw myself as the one in charge. And now I know you’re the one.”

“I appreciate that and it sounds nice. Tell me more.”

“Well I’m making this up as I go along, but I picture the position as a component of working at the library overall. I would be your nonhierarchical coworker and we would each lead our own component of the library and assist each other in whatever ways we need. I would still be here for classes to help you, and you would do regular workdays preparing for class and doing general library administration. We’ll work out the details together as we go. Please say yes, please please please.”

“Pleeeeeeeeeease,” Roland chimed in. Maleficent hadn’t even realized he had been listening, but he looked up at her with excited, pleading expectation, and well, it was like Regina had said. Anything for those dimples.

She had not pictured herself doing this, but apparently she was great at it and she loved the idea of the quiet seclusion of the library with intervals of the bubbly chatter of the drama students. “I would love to.”

Belle clasped her hands together. “I’m excited about this. Come by tomorrow and we can talk details and paperwork, yeah?”

She nodded, and Roland jumped up and down, smiling a smile that spread to her and Belle as well.

 

Beleaf in Magic was an adorable new place near Granny’s Diner that sold tea, coffee, and pastries. They held open mics and had a rotating local artist gallery (lately it was Sydney’s human interest themed photography) and a community wall that advertised Archie’s business, other resources, and events that the people might be interested in. Ruby opened it as an extension of Granny’s in partnership with her new fiancée Dorothy, and divided her time between the places, which is why she hired Lily to assist them. Maleficent would drop in and make conversation with her daughter during the brief lulls where there were no customers in line, although that was less frequent as more and more people in town started to catch on. She also liked to watch the projects Lily would take on, like cataloguing the bookshelf so that people could check out materials.

Lily also loved to create new tea blends and name them after townsfolk. When Ruby and Dorothy saw that she had created a blend called Red Kansas, made of rooibos and corn silk, they had been delightfully flattered, and encouraged her to create more. Zelena happened to be there at the time and had enviously asked to be included, which resulted in one of the most popular blends, the Green Energy: Green tea, lemongrass, and dried green apple.

At nearly noon, Maleficent and Regina huddled in the corner booth suppressing smiles and trying not to appear to spy as they watched Lily assemble a concoction of tea with dedicated concentration.

“It’s like she’s making potions,” Regina said. “A girl after my own heart. We should teach her magic. Through both of us she’d be unstoppable.”

“She’s the most magical person I’ve ever known,” Mal said. “But metaphorically. She’s not very interested in doing actual magic, which is okay. My mother wasn’t a witch either. Being a dragon is more power than most people ever yield.”

“I relate to that feeling. I was surprised when you thought I was teaching Roland because I feel the same way about him. He’s so special to me, but there’s something enchanting about his ordinariness.”

“Did you talk to him about the fact that you called him your child?”

Regina looked at her coffee. “Sometimes I wonder if I’m the worst thing that ever happened to him. I am responsible for his mother’s death. His father died protecting me. I don’t know how to reverse that.”

“You cannot reverse things. You can only atone. And you are atoning.”

“Thank you,” Regina said. “Still, I want to give him time. I want him to know he is safe and cared for without coming on strong.”

“You’re such a mom,” Mal said sweetly.

“I’m sure it’s a surprise. Back home I was not quite what you would expect from a mother, what with trying to curse my stepdaughter.”

“You were so hurt and using the only agency you thought you had. And now you’ve gone in the opposite direction.”

“Opposite?”

“You adore her. I can tell you like Snow White. She could melt in a fire for all I care. But you love her.”

Regina hesitated, then asked, “I know how you feel about her and David. But does it bother you that they have become my family?”

“I don’t know,” Mal said. “I really have no idea what to think. I’ve talked it out with Lily and it’s quite complicated for her as well. Mary Margaret and David have apologized, and they’ve even tried to help us. Lily is still hurt but she’s torn because they’ve started to feel increasingly inevitable to her.”

Regina’s eyebrows knitted together in concern. “I know it’s a small town but I’ve kept them away from her. Is there a reason she still feels like they’re so inevitable?”

Just then, Emma Swan came into the shop, her sheriff badge attached to her red jacket.

Mal tapped Regina’s foot lightly and bit into her lemon cake with demonstrated casualness as Regina followed suit and sipped her own coffee.

Lily’s face lit up. “Hey,” she said. “You’re earlier than usual.”

Emma nodded at Regina and Mal, who waved back, before redirecting her attention to Lily. “Well I got an early call that Pongo got loose and was missing, so my shift began at daybreak today. Don’t worry, I found him.”

“So are we still on for after work?”

Emma said, “Of course we’re still on. I’m looking for something maybe mildly caffeinated to get me through the next few hours. After that, I’ll be running on the pure excitement of getting to spend the evening with you.” She leaned on the counter, speaking to Lily closely. “Plus seeing you sooner than planned isn’t exactly torture.”

“ _Oh_ ,” Regina whispered to Mal, suppressing a grin.

 “This is serendipity because I just finished perfecting the balance in this tea. It’s the drink of the week.” She reached across the counter and took Emma’s hands, and placed them over Emma’s eyes. “Stay like that.” Behind the counter, Lily pulled a small stepstool up to the wall and placed the “Drink of the Week” blackboard menu high upon it. “Okay, you can look.”

Maleficent watched Emma’s half smile when she took her hands off of her eyes.

In white chalk Lily had written ‘Light Magic’. Under that, she had written “white tea, vanilla, and cinnamon”.

“Do you want a taste?”

Emma nodded, blushing, while Lily poured her a sample sized cup of the tea. Emma took a sip and assumed a full smile that Mal could not imagine being erased if the whole shop came crashing down around them. “You made this for me,” Emma acknowledged.

“I know you love cinnamon,” Lily said. “And I think it’s really cool that you’re light magic. It’s been fun naming blends after people, and I haven’t done you yet.”

This time it was Regina who lightly kicked Mal when she broke into subtle giggles, hiding her face by putting it in her hands.

 “You’re magic too,” Emma said, “in a different way. And I love the tea.”

Maleficent had noticed it weeks ago, but waited for Lily to bring it to her attention. Her daughter’s entry point regarding the matter over breakfast one day was, “Did you know that Emma was my first kiss?” and Mal had almost thought Lily meant that despite her age, her first kiss had been here in Storybrooke recently. When she learned the truth she was intrigued by the way that the universe had called these two women together more than once. That, combined with Lily’s shy, giddy grin whenever she talked about Emma stopped Mal from feeling the frustration she may have otherwise allowed to overtake her. Yes this was the Charmings’ daughter, but maybe there was something celestial, something strangely, ironically, bitterly cosmic about these two women’s intertwined souls, their matched consciousness and consciences. Emma also held none of the cloying, moralizing, goody-goody self-righteousness of her parents. She was not the worst person for her daughter to be touching wrists with as they spoke in hushed tones across the tea shop counter.


	6. Chapter 6

The forest in wintertime was dry and sparse with open fields beneath the grey-white sky. Maleficent delighted in the chance to come to the area to practice flying with Lily. In an ideal world unmarred by curses and kidnappings, she would have taught Lily these things as a small child, but she took joy in the chance to do it now, to bond over something so unique to the two of them.

During that first transformation Lily had been panicked, frightened, jarred so abruptly out of her own body as she knew it, and in a sense, her own world for the first time. Mal had spent hours afterward talking to her about what it meant to be one person with two forms. What it meant to be a human in every sense, but also to be a dragon just as fully. The second time, Lily had been better prepared. She trusted Mal, and was not so torn about her questions of identity. Her flying, however, was still frighteningly chaotic, and she was so shaken that they both decided she should take some time cooling off until the next lesson.

Now, Regina came along with the two of them. When she and Lily took on their dragon forms and soared upwards, she saw Regina below, tiny, looking up at them with admiration and plain happiness. High up in the wind, she demonstrated to Lily what it was like to catch currents, to make controlled movements in one direction or another, to let yourself fall into a peaceful, instinctive style. Lily struggled behind her, trailed, veered, careened. She fell further behind.

Maleficent wondered if this was something that had to be done in your formative years. What if being instinctive at flying was lost to Lily forever because she had not learned it as a child?

Lily staggered to the ground with a startling lack of grace. Mal followed her, landing delicately.

With the two of them back in human form, Lily slumped in the dirt and hay, her face fallen. “I’m never going to be good at this.”

It was Regina who took Lily’s face in her hands. “Don’t be so crestfallen, my dear. You’ve gone into dragon form what? Three times? Four? You spent your whole life unable to access this body. You’re going to be fine. Everything is new for you and you have all the time in the world.”

Lily smiled a little, holding Regina’s gaze. “When did you learn to be such a pep talker?”

Regina said, amused, “Actually I gave Henry a similar speech when he started to hit puberty. I’m not sure where my little boy went, but he’s been replaced by someone who sounds like a different person and won’t hang up the phone with Violet. He fell down the stairs twice because he’s suddenly a foot taller. I know that’s a milder example, but the point is that change is a big thing, and you don’t have to approach it like it’s anything but. You can take baby steps.”

Mal added, “You’re doing okay. You’re going to be soaring through the sky someday sooner than you think.” She tried to tell herself that this was true, but she found herself hyper aware, just like when Lily was growing inside her egg, that she had no one and nothing to tell her what was normal and what was cause for concern.

“Can I suggest something?” Regina asked.

The two of them nodded.

“I remember when you were teaching me magic,” Regina said to Mal, a sparkle in her tone. “I admired you so much. No matter what you did, I would watch you so closely, side by side, and try to do exactly what you did. I thought that was the only way to get things exactly perfect. But then you realized what I was doing, and you changed your tactic. Instead of doing a spell or a potion simultaneously, you’d demonstrate, and then have me do it on my own without you to follow step-by-step. You taught me that I could add my own individuality, and that there was more room than I had realized, for personalization and for self-discovery. Maybe Lily would benefit from that. She’s seen you fly. Now you should let her try without following you. Stay here on the ground with me and we can watch from below.”

Mal looked at Lily. “Do you think you can do that? Fly without me?”

Lily straightened her shoulders. “I can try.”

Regina took Mal’s hand, linking her fingers tightly, as they watched Lily transform in a cloud of smoke. Maleficent was still not even a little bit over the elation of watching her baby girl become a dragon. Her heart filled with pride at the sight of her, at the wonder of seeing someone who looked more like her than anyone had ever looked like her. Then Lily took to the sky, and Maleficent channeled all of her hope and excitement into Lily as her beautiful daughter soared, carried by the current.

“Look at her,” Regina whispered. She put her head on Mal’s shoulder, sharing the overwhelming emotions of the moment.

Mal laughed happily as they held their attention on Lily in the sky, a dark silhouette against the white winter backdrop.

But Lily was no longer soaring. She was ricocheting in every direction. She was falling, and she was falling harder than she had ever fallen.

Maleficent’s breath caught in her throat as dread filled her, as she froze in fear.

Regina let go of Maleficent and held out her hands. Suddenly Lily glowed with Regina’s magic. Lily began to coast down gently, while Regina held intense concentration in her eyes. “Look,” Regina said, but this time the joyful enchantment of her voice in the previous moment was replaced by concern. “ _Look_. Look at her wings.”

Now that Lily was suspended in the air, floating down slowly, Maleficent examined her outline. Lily held her wings spread to their full capacity, and this was when Maleficent focused and began to see what Regina was pointing out: Lily’s right wing was shorter than the other. The difference was not obvious, so much so that she had not realized it until now, but now that she knew, it was definitive. Her daughter sunk closer to the ground, and the details of her wings came into clearer focus. Maleficent drew her eyes from one side of Lily to the other, comparing.

“Did she injure herself?” Regina asked.

“No,” she whispered. They had been together each time, for each transformation.

“Well I don’t know,” Regina said. “Maybe she was born this way.”

Maleficent sunk, dazed, into the dry grass under her. Her heart pounded as the truth flooded her veins like a hit of all the world’s shame. “This is my fault,” she gasped. She gazed up again at Lily, who was almost on the ground. “Oh my god. Oh my god, I did this.”

Regina kneeled next to her in the dirt. “Maleficent, you’re scaring your daughter. Whatever is going on, we can talk about it, but you need to compose yourself for her sake.”

Maleficent looked up from her collapsed despair at Lily, who was becoming her human self again.

Lily rushed up to her. “I’m okay, Mom,” she said. “You don’t have to be upset. Regina saved me from falling.”

Maleficent nodded, standing. “I’m glad you’re okay.” She pulled Lily close, holding her tightly, but she could not do what Regina asked. She began to cry uncontrollably.

Lily cast her gaze down. “Are you upset that I failed?”

“ _No_ ,” she and Regina said at the same time.

“No, no my love,” Maleficent said, still holding her, stroking her hair. “I don’t want you to think this is your fault. You’re doing your very best.”

“Then what’s wrong?” She pulled away slightly to look at her mother.

“It’s nothing.” Maleficent could not meet her eyes.

“Okay,” Lily replied, quietly subdued. “I think this is enough for today. Can we go?”

They nodded, and Lily walked ahead of them to the car.

Maleficent regretted her chaotic display of emotions, but did not know how else to feel or behave. When they pulled up to her and Lily’s corner of the woods, Regina announced, “Lily, sweetie, you did great today. I’m going to talk to your mother alone.”

Lily nodded amicably and left the car to go into the house.

Maleficent sat in silence while Regina took her to her own home. Regina made two cups of the apple cider tea in the kitchen and Mal followed her when she brought them to her bedroom, setting them on the side table. “I thought the tea would help you. Do you want to tell me what’s going on?”

She sat cross-legged on Regina’s bed and buried her face in her hands. “Regina, I have seen you at your worst but you have not seen me at mine. You do not know what rock bottom looks like for me, and I’m afraid that when you do, you’ll believe I don’t deserve the happiness I have found.”

Regina squeezed her shoulder. “Whatever this is, I promise it is not as bad as you think. And whatever this is, I cannot judge you. Even if I wanted to, there is nothing you’ve done that I could ever judge.”

She wiped her eyes and looked up at Regina. “After you left me, I relapsed. I spent my days using curse. I have no idea who Lily’s father is because so many memories are a drug-induced haze. She appeared to me in my bed one day as this precious, mysterious egg. Even though she didn’t grow inside me, her egg was still made from me, and from the substance I put in my body. And now… I think it’s why she cannot fly. I think she may have been born with uneven wings because I drugged her.”

Regina took her hands, and linked their fingers together. “Mal,” she said. It was full of compassion, regret. “I’m sorry.”

It was not a generic apology, an expression of sympathy. It was guilt.

“You did nothing. You did not force me to do this to myself, or to her.”

“I still broke your heart,” Regina said. “Which led to your relapse. And I can’t help but think about what if.”

 “I’m the one who did this. And then I told her a lie, a vague story about how I only saw her father in dragon form. I just didn’t want her to feel bad. But now I have to tell her the truth. About curse, and what it is. Because she deserves an explanation for why I can’t find her father, and for why she can’t fly.”

Regina sat with her in heavy silence.

“There’s more,” Maleficent said.

Regina looked at her, waiting to listen.

“There was one moment with her at Granny’s Diner. She said she spent so long wondering how two humans got her away from me. She called me a pushover. And I let her continue to be confused rather than know what really happened, which is that I had lost my magic. The reason they were able to kidnap her is because I was so weak from withdrawal.”

“Oh my god,” Regina whispered. “When was this?”

“Right before the dark curse struck. She was born in the hands of the people who sent her through a portal. All I wanted was to keep her safe. The worst thing is that I was getting _better_. I was trying to do the best for my baby and get clean for her. I wanted to give her everything. She doesn’t know how much she would have been everything to me, and that my motivation to be a good mother was how I went off of my worst addiction. I was getting better. I wanted everything to be perfect for her. But they came and took her and I was so physically weak from the aftermath of this drug that I wouldn’t have even been able to throw a rock at them, let alone fight back.”

Regina continued to hold her hands, fingers linked. “You told me recently that there’s no way to reverse things, that we just have to atone. That’s all you can do. I have faith that she’ll forgive you. And no matter what, I believe you still deserve happiness. We look back at our worst selves and we can believe that we aren’t worthy of love, but its not true, and we can’t give in to this self-sabotage. You’re worthy of Lily’s love, and she is worthy of yours. Just tell her.”

“What if she never flies normally? I’ve been so angry at Mary Margaret and David for cursing her, but I literally poisoned her with curse.”

“You didn’t know. You did everything to be a good mother as soon as you found out about her. And now with Lily’s wing, you just have to address it and move forward however you can,” Regina said.

“What if she leaves?”

Regina looked down. “I want to confess something too. I said ‘oh my god’, but I was thinking about something that I did, not something you did. The day I cast the curse, I heard you through every mirror in the castle. I’m starting to realize that it was when they took Lily. And the reason I didn’t come to you is _not_ because I didn’t want to help you. It’s because I knew how it would end if I did. You had gotten to me. I realized how much I loved you, how much you would have led me away from the dark curse. I also feared that I would still want to cast it… but that it would make me sacrifice you, which I could never do. I couldn’t admit the truth of my love for you and it made me choose not to come to your side that night. I’m so sorry for ever calling you weak. You weren’t. I was, for refusing to admit that you were my true love. If I had, maybe I could have helped you find Lily and get her back.”

“I thought Robin was your true love.”

“He was, and he’s still in my heart. But I’ve learned that true love comes in many forms. For example, my love for Henry was true and magical enough that it broke a curse. And my love for you has spanned four decades. I don’t know or care if we would be capable of doing magic with it. I just know I’ve loved you for so long, and I need you to know that.”

Maleficent looked tearfully into Regina’s eyes.

“I know you’re focused on Lily right now. But I needed you to know that it was not completely your fault. I let you down. But I will not do that ever again, and I will do everything in my power this time to keep you from losing her.”

 

When Maleficent returned home that night, Lily was on the couch in her sweats, absorbed in her phone. “Hey,” she said softly without looking up.

“Hello Lily,” Mal greeted her.

Without further acknowledgment, Lily stood and went into her room.

Mal wondered if now was the right time. If there would ever be a right time for her to look her daughter in the eye and tell her the thing that might destroy her, might cause her to walk away and never come back. She debated with herself, and then went to Lily’s door and knocked.

Lily opened it. “Hey.” She was in jeans now, and gathering a small bag together. “What’s up?”

“Can we talk?”

“Well not right now. I’m going to Emma’s. I’m just gonna crash there.”

“Oh.” Maleficent looked down at her hands. “I just hoped when I got home that I would have the chance to spend time with you.”

“I didn’t know. You should text me next time.”

“I’m pretty sure you’re aware I’ve spent enough time in this world to know what that means, but not how to do it.”

Lily shrugged.

“Okay, well… tell Emma I said hello.”

“I think she’d appreciate that,” Lily said. “You know, she wants your approval so much.”

“Does she think she doesn’t have it?”

“I don’t even know what you think,” Lily said. “Though that’s a topic for another conversation. Maybe tomorrow.” She picked up her bag, slung it over her shoulder, and gave Mal a brief side-hug before exiting through the hall and out the front door.

 

“It’s like the mirrors we used to have,” Regina said, sitting with her on the couch the next evening side-by-side with their phones. Regina touched the video call app on each of their phones. “See? You can call people whenever you want, and you can see and talk to each other.”

“Why do they say this land has no magic when it’s full of things like this?”

“Because it’s technology. It’s… science.”

“Can I just give Lily a magic mirror?” Mal asked.

“Sure, but this is about meeting your daughter where she’s at, and it’s about adapting to this world. Let me see you send the text.”

Maleficent typed, “My dearest love Lily, can we talk tonight? Sincerely, your mother.”

“Don’t say ‘Sincerely, your mother’,” Regina said. “She knows it’s from you. Also, you can use the heart emoji.”

Maleficent edited her text. “Is this good?”

“It’s nice.”

Maleficent sent it.

“You’re amazingly good at picking up on technology.”

“That’s what Belle said at work today,” Mal replied. “She taught me how to catalogue books, and various other functions of a computer. She says she had to read so many books before she understood what she was doing, back when she first started working at the library. For me, it was easy because it was almost like learning new spells, although in an opposite way.”

“Because magic is fueled by passion and is so personal,” Regina deduced. “And technology, science, is so mechanical, so straightforward in comparison. Dr. Whale thinks science is greater than magic. But you could never compare those two things. This world has better technology than our home world, but there are things that come from magic that science could never comprehend, let alone bring to us.”

“That might be why learning technology has been so easy, and also so hard. I think doing magic has acclimated me to putting so much emotion into things, so I had to adapt to doing procedures where the outcome is automated, where it doesn’t matter how you feel. I fared okay though, and since we did so much in a day Belle suggested I go home early and she would close. Do you know what she said?”

“What?”

“She said, ‘You’ve had a big day and you probably want to get home to Regina.’”

Regina smiled. “And did you?”

“The point is, she thought we were living together.”

“And yet, here you are,” Regina said, with that hint of teasing, that pleased affection. Here they both were.

Their heads were leaned together, a gesture residual from their phone huddle. Their feet were up on the couch, knees touching. They had fallen into a level of comfort with each other reminiscent of lost days. But Mal was so aware of their liminal space of hesitation.

The phone pinged, and they each directed their attention to it. “She replied,” Regina narrated.

It said, _“Sure.”_

“This is good,” Mal said. “She’ll be free to talk to me.”

Shoulder to shoulder, she sensed Regina’s almost sigh, a disagreement that was more kinesthetic than audial.

“What?”

Regina pursed her lips together. “I just want this to go well, so I’m worrying.”

“I’m not new to this,” Mal said. “I spent the first week or so with her worried every day that I would go to Granny’s Bed and Breakfast to see her, or that I would try to call her, and that she’d be gone. That she’d have decided she was too frightened by all of this – by being a dragon, by having me in her life at all, by the town. But she didn’t leave, and now I feel that this is my redemption, my chance to do the right thing for her. The stakes of this conversation are so high for me that I can’t obsess over what may happen. It would destroy me before I have the chance for anything else to happen. So I’m just going to wait and talk to her.”

 

That night, sitting face-to-face on the couch of their own living room, she told Lily everything. She began with the moment she saw Lily in her egg. She talked of the protectiveness that had surged into her heart, how she felt tied to Lily from that incipient moment. She talked about how she spent her days preparing for Lily’s arrival. She had told Lily here in Storybrooke that she did not drink or take anything intoxicating. Now she explained that it was because of her recovery from a thing called curse, a drug that had disempowered her in the most literal sense, had taken her memories, her sense of control, and her magic.

She was sure she turned rose-pink discussing it, but she explained how the identity of Lily’s father was a mystery due to the decisions she’d made under the influence of curse.

She told Lily why Snow and Charming were able to take her. She told Lily how sorry she was.

Lily listened quietly. She kept her gaze down. She was attentive, but unreadable, even in her interjections, like when she asked where Regina had been, or why the pages depicting this weren’t in the book. The latter question did not have an answer that Maleficent knew of.

“It was time you knew,” Maleficent said. “Not just because it is the truth. But for another reason, a serious one. Because of what curse does to an unborn child. I was ignorant. I didn’t know that you would come to exist. But since I was addicted to the drug when I formed you as an egg… I think it is why you have struggled to fly. You have two uneven wings.”

“I do?”

“Yes. We only noticed it when you were coasting to the ground under Regina’s spell. Unless you have some past injury, perhaps even as a human, or some other explanation, I cannot think of a single other reason you would have this defect.”

“I never had a broken arm or anything I can think of,” Lily said.

Maleficent cast her eyes down solemnly. “Then my suspicions are right. I’m so sorry, sweetie. Please know that I would never, ever intentionally hurt you. All I dreamed about when you were going to be born, was the joy of doing things like teaching you to fly. It’s one of the most fundamental parts of being a dragon. Now I don’t know if you’ll ever be able to and I’m trying to forgive myself for that and for all of the other awful tragedies you’ve gone through because of me. I didn’t mean to do this. Please forgive me. I’m sorry.” She felt tears welling in her eyes, and tried to blink them away, to be strong for Lily.

Lily gazed at her for a moment, then stood. “I’m going to my girlfriend’s house. I know you probably wanted to talk about this longer, but this is just a lot for me to hear and I don’t want to do this right now.”

“Lily, sweetie, I-”

 “I thought you were disappointed in me,” Lily interrupted. “This whole time. Ever since yesterday when we went flying. I cried in Emma’s arms for so long that night. I thought I was so bad at flying that you couldn’t even stand up straight from disappointment. I thought you were devastated because I was so old learning something so elementary and doing so freaking badly. You’re so powerful and so magical, and I felt _so_ inadequate. But you were upset because you were caught up in your own melodrama and guilt thinking back to all of the selfish and horrible decisions you’ve made.”

She had blamed herself before, watching Lily be snatched away by her enemies. But this time, as Lily left willingly, refusing to look at her, she was aware that she could not place even the smallest blame on Snow White, Prince Charming, or a single other person. She was the only one who could have salvaged this, and she had failed.


	7. Chapter 7

Day after day, Lily did not come home. Wanting to give her space, she avoided the tea shop. After a week, she came in, but Dorothy was there and insisted with a stammering, awkward glance to the back room that Lily was not working that day. Being ten feet from her child who had resorted to hiding from her was distressing in a way she did not know how to respond to. Once again, she thought bitterly about how everything she was going through with Lily felt so brand new and simultaneously belated. She called a few times, and sent only one text that said, “Please talk to me.”

She got no response.                       

It began to occur to her at a certain point that Lily may have left town for good. When she asked around, people assuaged this fear, claiming they had seen her.

But Lily went to great lengths to avoid her.

Several weeks passed of Mal going to work, spending time with Regina and her family, and trying her best to give Lily space, to not insist Lily talk to her even though she wanted so badly to make grand gestures. Regina assured her, from her experience with Henry right after the curse broke, that Lily was creating boundaries that she absolutely had to honor if she was ever going to earn her forgiveness.

When she appeared at Regina’s house to get Roland for theater club, Regina opened the door while putting a pointed-toe boot on and said, “Thank god you’re early. I’m running late and Zelena left. I’ll see you both later for dinner.” She gave Roland a kiss on his hair with a “Goodbye, my prince,” and touched Mal’s shoulder before she vanished out of the door in a hurry.

Mal reached for Roland’s hand as they headed out the door as well. “Are you ready for theater club?” she asked.

He nodded and clasped her hand.

Not ten feet from the front door, she felt the tug of weight at her hand, and looked to see Roland pulling away, collapsing his whole body to sit upon the cobblestones along Regina’s walkway.

“I don’t want to go,” Roland wailed, his eyes flooding with tears. He stayed on the ground and whimpered loudly.

She kneeled to the ground before him. “Why don’t you want to go? You love theater club.”

“I want my papa to take me.” Tears streamed down his face as it turned a deeper and deeper red.

He touched his head to the ground and began to cry loudly.

Mal reached out for him, but he wrenched from her abruptly. “No! I just want to be with my papa! It’s not fair! It’s not fair!” Head down on the ground, he continued to wail.

Regina had talked about the worst of Roland’s grief. He would sometimes climb into her bed crying, waking her up needing to be held close. “But he’s been okay,” Regina had said. “He knows his father is okay and he is such a persistently cheerful spirit.”

He cried with devastated, staggering breaths as he lay on the ground.

“Let’s go sit at the apple tree, okay?” Maleficent said. “Can I carry you or do you want to walk?”

Still crying, Roland looked up at her with need in his eyes. He lifted his arms to her. She scooped him up to her hip, bringing him a few feet away to the grass where Regina’s apple tree stood. With her back against the trunk, she sat him on her lap and let him cry into the crook of her neck. He clung to her tightly as he sobbed.

“You’re gonna be okay,” she said softly. “You can cry whenever you want, you know that? Everyone tells me your papa was a very good person, just like you. I know how much you must miss him.”

“It’s not fair,” Roland gasped again through his sobs.

“I know, little one, I know.”

He cried for a while in her arms, and she sat and held him, swaying side to side with her arms around him. She stroked his head and continued to soothingly assure him.

This was the second person she had held through their grief over Robin Hood. It was like listening to someone in a language you only know certain words of – to know pieces but to not comprehend, and certainly not _feel_ as viscerally as someone who had been surrounded by him. She did not feel what it was to know Robin Hood so personally, to love him so intensely, and to mourn him so sadly as she had seen Regina and now Roland mourn him.

Yet there was something she did know about Roland’s sorrow.

“What is your favorite thing in Storybrooke that you used to do with your papa?” she asked.

Roland’s sobbing had eventually subdued into quieter tears, but she still felt the anguish in the child’s weeping against her. Now, he looked at her and said through his tears, “The castle playground. He used to always push me on the swings.”

“That sounds fun.”           

“He pushed me really high and I would jump off.”

“Do you want to go back to the swings?” Mal asked. “And we can talk more about how much you love him?”

He looked up at her. “Okay.”                                              

She told him she just needed to tell Belle that she was not going to work. “It’s a family emergency,” she explained to Belle on the phone, with Roland on her shoulders clinging to her head as she walked to the park. “Roland’s not doing too well, but he’s going to be just fine because I’m going to stay with him.”

She knew Regina was in a meeting but she texted, “Roland is having a sad day so we’re going to the playground instead of the library.”

On the playground, Roland let her push him on the swing.

“Tell me one nice thing about your papa,” she said.

Quietly but confidently, he said, “He was famous because he always helped people.”

“What did he help people do?”

“Some people were bullies who took everything from poor people. He stole it back for them.”

“It sounds like he was a hero,” Maleficent said. “Did you help him?”

“Yeah.” Swinging back and forth, he turned to look back at her with a vague smile. “He didn’t used to let me help, but I always wanted to help so one time he let me sing to all the people at the treasury. And when they were all turned to me, he and the merry men snuck inside. Nobody knew they were sneaking in because they were looking at me and they thought I was such a good singer, and they said I was so cute.”

“I’m sure it was adorable. Do you like to sing?”

“I love to sing,” Roland said. “My papa taught me a lot of songs.”

“Sing me one.”

Roland was quiet for a minute, and then in a sweet, folksy voice, he sang:

_Robin Hood and Little Roland walkin' through the forest_

_Laughin' back and forth at what the other'ne has to say_

_Reminiscin', This-'n'-thattin' havin' such a good time_

_Oo-de-lally, oo-de-lally, golly, what a day_

He continued to sing an utterly winsome ditty about jumping fences to outrun sheriffs and engaging in other bandit mischief.

Maleficent smiled through the whole song. “I didn’t know your papa,” she said. “But I can tell what kind of person he was, and I can see that he was nice, and fun, and a good singer, and made you feel happy and good. You can always cry if you want, but remember that happy feeling too. The way he was.”

“He was the best papa ever,” Roland said.

“Tell me more things about him.”

“He was really tall,” Roland responded, leaning so far back on the swing that he could look at her almost upside down when he tilted his head to her beside him. He held a smile.

She laughed. “What else?”

“He was an archer. That means he had a bow and arrow.”

“Was he a good archer?”

“Yeah. He always told me we only use arrows to protect ourselves. He always promised to protect me.”

“I’m sure he was wonderful at protecting you,” Maleficent said.

“But he can’t anymore,” Roland said. He stopped kicking his feet to propel himself.

As he shifted gently into a still position on the swing, Maleficent joined the swing next to him and turned herself to face him.

“Do you think Hades can hurt me?” he asked.

“No,” Maleficent promised. “Hades can never hurt you. Never, ever. Hades is dead.”

“So if you’re dead, you can’t come back ever?”

Of course, the answer was that it depended. She had entered a state some might consider death. So had Henry, when he had succumbed to the sleeping curse that Emma woke him from. She had heard that Dr. Whale had created horrors from the remains of his own brother and from Regina’s first love, Daniel. There were others. But she decided to go with the spirit of the question. “Hades is dead for sure, and he cannot hurt you. And I know it hurts to know this, sweetie, but your papa cannot come back either. But when you sing? He lives on.”

Roland nodded at her.

“But if anything ever scares you, just remember that you have me to protect you, and you have Regina, and we’re the most powerful sorcerers in the land. Nobody is out to hurt you, but even if someone was, they would never get through a fire-breathing dragon.”

His face lit up. “I want to see you breathe fire. Can you show me?”

She smiled. In her hand, she conjured a marshmallow upon a stick. “Are you ready?”

He nodded with glee.

She blew gently upon the marshmallow, and the flames toasted the treat, turning it to a perfect golden-brown. Roland watched with amusement, and then reached for the marshmallow the moment the flames blew out.

She handed it to him, and he touched the marshmallow, checking for heat, before biting into it.       

“Did your papa ever twist you on the swings so that you could spin?” Maleficent asked when he had finished his marshmallow.

He shook his head, so Maleficent spun her finger in a circle. She used magic to twirl him around and around on his swing. She watched the smile spread across his face as he felt himself spinning. He looked at her with wonder, and she considered that this along with the marshmallow was probably the most magic she had ever done in front of him. When the swings were wound up, she held up her palm and the swings steadied. “I’m going to let go,” she warned, and he nodded. The swing swished into a rapid spinning motion as it untwisted, and he shrieked in joy, looking at her with mirth and then promptly having his gaze torn from her every half second or so, as he spun around. “Haha, I’m so dizzy!” he declared, when the swing had settled. “Where did you learn that trick?”

“From my mother,” she said. “In the enchanted forest. We had a swing like this, though it was made of rope and wood, and she wound me by walking in a circle without magic.”

“How old were you when she died?”

“I was around your age.”

“Did someone kill her?”

“Yes,” she said. She did not think this was the story to tell a mourning child, but children seemed to be surprising her lately with their understanding of suffering. “First my papa died, and then my mother.”

“How?”

“Well,” she said. “my papa was a good man. I remember his golden hair, curly like yours. I remember him finding me berries in the forest and feeding them to me. Looking for berries together was my favorite thing to do with him, my only real memory really. My mother remembered him much better than I did. He was her true love, after all. And he went to go fight in the Ogres’ War. The war was very scary for most people, and they didn’t want to fight, but my papa said that with a dragon on their side, they could win. He knew he could survive and save everyone, and he was right. He used fire to stop the ogres. The war was almost over, and he was a hero. But bad people, people on the ogres’ side, they used magic and they captured him. They used magic to make him hurt the people in our kingdom and then they killed him. After that, people began to fear dragons. They said that dragons will hurt innocent people with fire, and that we should be slayed. They decided to hunt us for fun and for trophies, calling it bravery. They came armed with magic to kill my mother, but my mother hid me away. She put me in the attic and told me to hold my rattle for luck, but don’t shake it or they would hear me. That was the last thing she said to me.”

“Who took care of you after that?” Roland asked.

“My mother had taught me a lot. She left me our castle. She taught me how to find food, like how to gather apples. And she taught me to breathe fire. One day I used fire to melt a puddle into a part of the frozen lake, just big enough to take a bath. The fairies stumbled upon me, and they were surprised for just a moment when they mistook me for a little witch. But I wasn’t. I didn’t know any magic but how to create fire and how to be a dragon. So they taught me. They were my friends growing up and they looked out for me and taught me things.”

“So you’re friends with the Blue Fairy?”

“The same kind of fairies, but different people. Nicer and less self-righteous, I would say.”

“I remember my mama but only a little bit,” he said. “But my papa told me how she was really smart, and helped him plan adventures, and always cheered for him. I remember she was really pretty. I miss her, even though I’m happy Regina loves me. Henry told me how you can love more than one mom.”

The parking area of the playground was just in the distance, and Mal noticed the car that pulled up. “It’s Regina,” she said.

Regina emerged from her car and waved toward them. Picking up on the energy of the moment, she smiled.

“Hi Regina,” Roland said.

“I left the meeting as soon as I could,” she said. “Are you okay?” Regina reached for Roland, who held his arms out. She picked him up and held him, his arms clinging to her shoulders, his legs around her waist. She gave him a handful of kisses on his face.

“We’re better,” Mal assured Regina. It wasn’t just Roland who was in better spirits. Talking to him, from reminiscing on her own parents to hearing his sweet song, had patched a place in her heart she didn’t even realize needed healing.

Regina sat on the swing next to Mal, with Roland still in her arms. “What have you two been talking about?”

“Mal made me a toasted marshmallow,” Roland said, causing Mal to laugh at the precision of his summary.

“We were talking about our papas,” Mal added. “And his mama and mine. And we loved them and they made us happy, so we can smile when we think of them, even though it’s okay if we cry,” she elaborated.

Roland nodded, looking at Maleficent from Regina’s shoulder.

“I was thinking,” Regina said to Roland. “Do you remember Dr. Hopper?”

“Does he have a dog?”

“Yes, he has Pongo. If you want to play with Pongo and talk to Dr. Hopper, you can. His job is to help you talk about your feelings, like about your papa. Do you want to talk to him?”

Roland said, “Can I give treats to Pongo?”

“Yes, love. And I can send human food for you to eat with Dr. Hopper too.”

“Okay,” Roland said.

“But you also _always_ have us and Henry and anybody else to talk to,” Mal emphasized.

“I like the way you talk about feelings. When you help us think about stuff in theater club. Like if I’m happy or scared or confused.”

“It’s you all who do the bigger job,” she said. “But I’m glad it helps.”

“All the kids say they like that about you,” he added.

She contemplated this for a minute. “I’ve had many reputations, but none have been as the soother of children.”

“But you’re pleased by this,” Regina said, giving her a perceptive smile as she held the little boy.

“Surprised,” Maleficent replied, which was not a disagreement.

“You’ve held this gift since I met you. The only change is the audience,” Regina said.

“Does Maleficent always make you feel better about your feelings?” Roland asked Regina, putting his face in her neck as he clung to her.

“Always.”

 

At work one day, Belle remarked to her, standing by the window, “Hey, it’s your daughter!”

From the window a few stories high, Maleficent saw Lily on the sidewalk strolling by the library. She held Emma’s hand. The two of them were dressed similarly, in tank tops and jeans, as if Lily had been borrowing Emma’s clothes and had not gone home once, even during Maleficent’s work hours.

She thought about what Lily had said. Lily had used words like melodrama and guilt, selfish and horrible. But she was trying to take responsibility, so how was that selfish?

“It’s not,” Regina said later. “At least not in and of itself. But you don’t know what she’s going through, what she’s thinking. And since she obviously needs space, you have to accept that, and be ready to do what you need to do for her on her own time. I know more than anyone that redeeming yourself is not just about feeling particularly bad about what you’ve done. It’s about being what that other person needs.”

She lay stretched on the couch with her head in Regina’s lap. Regina was stroking her hair, occasionally twirling her fingers through locks of her long blonde tresses. Regina knew how to be comforting, how to be reassuring when she needed to be. Most people saw her in a closed-off form, but Mal took comfort in Regina’s willingness to give. She looked up into Regina’s eyes. “I hope she still needs me.”

Maleficent’s phone rang. When she saw that it was Lily, she looked to Regina. “What do I do?”

“Answer it!” Regina urged her.

Mal picked up. “Lily.”

“Mom. Can you come meet me? Me and Emma?”

“Yes, where?”

“We’re at the clearing. I’m assuming you’re with Regina?”

She smiled. “Yes, she’s right here.”

Regina leaned her ear all the way to Mal’s phone, trying to listen in with a mischievous smile.

“She can come too.”

Maleficent nodded, feeling her uncontrollable smile and tears come to her at once. “Okay,” she responded, when she remembered that Lily could not see her.

“You are such a crybaby,” Regina remarked with delicate affection, once she’d hung up.

“She wants us to come right away to the clearing to see her,” Mal said, sitting up to look at Regina.

“Well then let’s take a shortcut.” Regina poofed them away.

 

In the clearing, they appeared to the sight of Emma gazing up at the sky. They heard the beautiful roar of a dragon, and looked up to see Lily against the skyline, coasting in smooth, skilled circles.

“She’s flying,” Mal breathed, fixed upon the sight.

“She’s great at it,” Emma said. “Don’t be nervous – I’ve been spotting her. I’ve caught her like twenty times. But I don’t think I’ll ever have to catch her again.”

They all watched as Lily swooped through the sky. So much of flying involved coasting, catching a current and riding it effortlessly, but you did have to flap wings to stay on the currents, and when Lily did this, she flapped her shorter right wing at a quicker pace than her left. It created an evenness that she had not had in her past attempts.

“She’s learned to adapt to the two different wings,” Emma explained. “She just needed to get into a rhythm so that she could still stay upright.” She laughed. “She said she felt bad ass like Nemo. It’s air, not water, but basically the same thing.”

“I don’t know who that is, but I’m so proud of her,” Mal said.

“You should go up there with her,” Regina encouraged.

“Do you think she wants me to?” Mal looked from Regina to Emma.

Emma smiled reassuringly. “That’s why she called you here.”

Mal transformed into dragon form and soared into the sky. Coasting onto the same current, she caught up to Lily and the two of them swooped together through the sky, side by side. The feeling of flying together with another dragon had been lost to her, but she was overwhelmed by the familiarity as it came back. She was the mother now, and she would do everything to teach and protect Lily like her own mother had done.

Lily sped ahead of her, in the loops and swirls that showed her lighthearted energy. She followed Lily, swooping to match her pattern. She felt apprehension at first, worried that Lily would try something too advanced for her with her uneven wings, but her nerves faded as she watched Lily move steadily. They flew across the white sky, over the sparse forest. Mal saw the bare trees and the wet mulch with sharp dragon clarity. In the distance, she saw the ocean and her heart soared at the idea of flying once again near the water.

The sparkle of the sea lay out before them, and Lily went swooping low over the waves, then turned sharply and headed to the sand. On the beach, she transformed in a poof of smoke to her human body.

Landing behind her, Mal followed. As soon as she felt herself become human, Lily ran up to her and hugged her close, laughter and giddy happiness shaking her.

She clung to her daughter. “I’m so proud of you.”                          

Lily looked at her with a contented smile. “Thank you.” She ran to the boulders by the water, and Maleficent joined her. Sitting side by side on the rocks, bare feet wet in the waves, Lily said to her, “I used to wish when I was little that I could just fly away. I used to dream of it at night. It was a recurring dream - that I was flying. Maybe it was the subconscious dragon part of me longing to be complete.” She looked at Mal. “I feel so complete.”

She looked with soft eyes at Lily, opened her mouth to speak, but Lily continued.

“I wanted you to be the one to teach me. I wanted to share this with you. But I need you to know how you made me feel. It wasn’t a good feeling. I didn’t even know I was a dragon until recently, and it’s made everything in my life make sense. The fact that I could fly at all, even if I was pretty bad at it, made me feel like I was something special. But you made me feel so broken.”

“I’m so sorry, Lily. I didn’t mean to undermine your strength.”

“I spent some time being pretty upset with you. I was upset to learn about the sleeping curse and the way it stopped you from protecting me against Mary Margaret and David. And how I have this birth condition that might have come from it. But you made it much worse, and I need you to know that. Your overreaction when we went flying with Regina made me feel so damaged. Even the way you brought it up to me the next day. You made me feel so helpless and tragic. Like you thought my whole life was ruined and like I could never be a real dragon. And when I came out here with Emma, I fell over and over and over. We had to keep going home because she couldn’t keep using magic to catch me, and I kept feeling so defeated. I think if I had realized I just needed to create different rhythms, I would’ve been able to intuitively pick up on what to do, but I was too unfamiliar with my own body and I didn’t have someone who personally understood. It took me longer without you.”

Maleficent, for once, stopped herself from interrupting, from blurting her defenses. She listened.

“And I know you wouldn’t abandon me, but it’s hard to _feel_ that. My parents growing up were always so disappointed, like adopting me was a gamble and they’d lost because I had so many mood and behavior issues. Issues I now know are a part of what the Charmings did to me. But Emma assured me that I wasn’t wrong for feeling so vulnerable. She used to see so many kids around her never get adopted once people found something ‘wrong’ with them.” Lily created air quotes around the word ‘wrong’. “People create fantasies of the perfect children and then mourn so deeply when their children are not that thing, as if their kids aren’t still alive. Seeing you crying in the grass when I fell made me feel that way – like some part of me was dead to you in your heart if I wasn’t perfect and couldn’t fly. So I came out here with Emma because I wanted to prove you wrong. I wanted to show you that I could do it.”

“You know you never had to prove yourself to me,” Maleficent said. “You never had to be good at something in order for me to adore and respect you. But you’re right. I made it about my sorrow and regret instead of about my support for you. I made it about how you were limited before I saw what you could even do. I’m so new at being a mother, and I was selfish. I was wrong and I’m sorry.”

“Thank you. Emma also reminded me how glad I am to have you, and how much I wanted to forgive you. Emma and I balance each other. She’s my other half in more ways than one. I feel excited and calmed, and good along with the bad, and at peace all at once with her. I never really bought the idea of soulmates, but I believe that when her parents did what they did, they sealed us in a way that I don’t have another name for. She’s a choice. I’m a choice for her. This relationship is made up of the choices we’ve made to be good to each other. But it’s also magic. I’ll be damned if I’m going to forgive her parents for taking me from you. But I almost feel like things fell together in the most amazing way possible considering that.”

“You called it serendipity when you were in the tea shop. It seems like the perfect word.”

“Oh my god you’re so awkward. Tell Regina I said you two need to work on your spying. Not subtle.” Lily nudged her teasingly.

“I can’t help it - you’re so cute with her.” Mal nudged her back.

Lily kicked the water. “What about you and Regina?”

Mal took a serious breath. “She’s grieving.”

“I understand. But she’s also in love with you.”

“That’s true.”

They sat in a calm silence.

“Thank you for forgiving me,” Mal said.

Lily put her arms around Mal, and her head on Mal’s shoulder. “Thanks for listening. I’m glad you’re here to experience this with me. Flying is so fulfilling, to be up in the air and to not fall. Or to look at the ground and have razor sharp vision, to be able to see everything.” She lifted her head from Maleficent’s shoulder to look at her with a bright smile. “I looked down at the forest floor on our way here and you’ll never guess what I saw! He was so majestic and beautiful with shiny brown fur. I saw a _unicorn_.”

 

Diablo was standing in a patch of cabbages in the forest, and when he saw her they ran toward each other with unbridled happiness. She wrapped her arms around his neck, laughing. He must have been in Storybrooke all along, not aging for twenty-eight years like everyone else. He was smart to stay in the woods away from the humans who would have misunderstood him during the curse. When he saw Lily, he sniffed her curiously, and then let her place her head against his with an affectionate nuzzle.

“He loves you already because he knows I love you,” Maleficent said.

When she and Lily emerged back into the clearing with Diablo, Emma and Regina gasped in delight, running up to hug them and to gaze in awe upon the unicorn. Fawning over Diablo, who laid down in the grass, they all sat in the field around him, petting him.

Mal looked at Emma. “Thank you for being here for Lily. Thank you for believing in her. And for helping her forgive me.”

“Of course,” Emma said. “We’ve talked a lot about it. I was horrified at my parents when I found out the evil they did against the two of you. I didn’t understand how they could just run around calling themselves heroes, like you and Lily didn’t even count, and tearing pages out of the book so no one would know. What they did was wrong. But I told Lily that if I could eventually forgive them for the wrong they did, then she could forgive you for being the victim of that, and for trying your best to save her.”

Regina said, “Henry forgave me. I accidentally drugged him with sleeping curse. He went to a netherworld. He got burned. But he forgave me.”

“We’ve all done pretty bad things,” Emma said. “But the best way to forgive is to know what it feels like to need that from someone else. Not that you have to do that. I forgave my parents, but I don’t justify what they did and I don’t expect anyone else to forgive them.”

“We don’t,” Lily said.

“It’s just not about them,” Maleficent said. “When you’ve been harmed, everyone lies to you. Forgiveness is treated like an obligation. But it’s not. It’s a gift, and it’s an honor to receive. And I believe you can move on for the sake of yourself and your loved ones, whether or not you choose to give that honor to the people who hurt you.”

“I just want you to know,” Emma said, “that I would never do anything like what they’ve done.”

Mal pulled Emma in for a close embrace. “I know. She’s the most special, most precious thing to me. I’m trusting you with her.”

“Okay Mom, this is not a wedding and you’re not giving me away,” Lily teased.

“Not today,” Maleficent replied.

“Mom, you’re embarrassing me,” Lily teased.

“Let’s all go to my place for dinner,” Regina changed the subject, to everyone’s agreement.

 

It began to snow as they all walked back to town. The cold was mild as it fell around them like a winter wonderland. Every child in sight, and most adults, came toward them in bubbly excitement to ask questions about Diablo and to pet him. Maleficent thought back to the days of the town square and the markets, where people gave her a respectful, weary distance, and spoke of the queen with fear and apprehension. Now when these same people ran up, their faces held whimsy and familiarity. Regina responded by holding little ones up to pet Diablo, and teasing dark answers to questions like, “What does he eat?” with “Naughty children, so you must always be good.”

“The first snow of winter,” Emma remarked as they continued on. She turned to Lily. “On your first day of flying like a pro.” She was walking with Lily a pace ahead of Mal and Regina, and leaned in to kiss Lily’s cheek. “A great day of new beginnings.”

At Regina’s house, they had to pull up extra chairs but they fit a table complete with Maleficent, Regina, Zelena, baby Robin, Roland, Henry, Violet, Emma, and Lily. Diablo stayed on the front lawn. Roland talked on and on about theater class, and Mal bragged about how well he and the other students were doing. The kids were debating upon a play to choose for their production. Since everyone wanted the best possible parts, most of the girls favored Annie, and most of the boys were leaning toward Oliver Twist. “I want to be Oliver,” Roland announced.

“We should do that play just for the casting,” Mal replied to him. “I can’t think of a more perfect Oliver Twist than you.”

“Why don’t you combine Oliver Twist with Annie?” Henry asked. “You can tell these classic stories, but combine them into a new version that hasn’t been done before. I can write it!”

“I want to help,” Violet chimed in.

Henry nodded excitedly to her. “We’ll mashup 'You've Got To Pick a Pocket or Two' with 'It's The Hard Knock Life'. We’ll set it all in a fantasy combination of London and New York, in a timeless realm.”

“Annie and Oliver can befriend each other when they run away,” Violet elaborated.

“Well it sounds like you two just got recruited to the Storybrooke Youth Theater Troupe,” Regina said to them.

“Belle and I would love some help,” Maleficent said to them. “And I’m sure Roland would love to spend more time with you, Henry.”

“I want to spend more time with you too, Rol.” Henry tousled Roland’s curly brown hair. Roland, always so forthcoming with affection, sent him a pleased giggle.

“We can all get involved,” Zelena said. “I’d be a genius at costumes, as you’d guess from my fashion sense. You’ve all seen my shoes.”

Lily chimed in, “I’m not really a musical person but I can advertise it at Beleaf. Maybe we’ll do a promotional thing, where I’ll make tea for the play’s theme. Ruby and Dorothy would love it.”

“If you need someone to build the set, I can help recruit Marco and August,” Emma added.

“Well we’re officially a family act,” Regina announced lightheartedly.

Once dinner was over, Roland said to Henry and Violet, “Let’s go play outside in the snow!”

“That sounds fun,” Henry replied. “Do you want to build a snowman?”

“With coal eyes and a carrot nose,” Violet suggested.

The women followed the children outside. The kids had fun throwing snow balls, catching still-falling flakes on their tongues, and forming snow into a snow-shaped person with a weirdly oblong face. Roland put branches upon the snowman’s head as hair. Emma and Lily’s attention was on Diablo, who was enthusiastically eating everything he could from the honeycrisp tree, while Zelena, with gentle attention to her baby’s responses, allowed Robin to gaze with serious curiosity upon the snowflakes in the air and touch them upon the ground.

Regina and Mal sat on the steps. “I have not seen snow since we lived in the Enchanted Forest,” Mal said. “While I cared for Lily in her egg.”

Regina placed her hand in Mal’s.

“Those memories are bittersweet. But being replaced by good ones,” she responded. She brushed Regina’s hair.

“Hey,” Regina said, bringing herself to sit even closer. She looked at Mal with so much expectation, so much that was unspoken but completely clear to them both.

“I want you to be ready.”

Regina looked at her like she had once so long ago, when things were complicated in completely different ways but their fearlessness had kept them flying. “I spoke to Henry and Roland. I asked them what they would think if I were to fall in love again. I thought I was going to have the longest heart-to-heart with them. Do you know what they said? Henry said, ‘You should be with Maleficent, Mom. We know you love her.’ I asked him why he thought this. And Roland said, ‘Because she’s so pretty and nice and if you marry her you can both be my mama.’ And the two of them just kind of shrugged and kissed me and walked away. I cried, in a good way, especially over what Roland said. I was so sure the question of whether I can be his mother would be hard for him, but here we are. So… this was always the case, but I want you to know that if you want me, we don’t have to rush this, at all. But this is what you’re signed up for.”

Maleficent looked at Roland and Henry, who were singing as they built the snowman. “There’s nothing I want more.” She leaned in, cupping Regina’s face. “If I kiss you here in front of the Wests, Emma, all of our children, and Diablo, you can’t easily take it back.”

“Good,” Regina promised.

Maybe it wasn’t true love’s kiss unless there was a spell to be broken. But that was what it felt like to finally hold the woman she loved close, to bring their lips together, and to feel the magic wash through them as she sealed a promise that she intended never to break.


	8. Chapter 8

She had never taken for granted the peace that came from the way the waves touched her toes, foam just delicately kissing her, grounding her in the natural early morning beauty around her. She kneeled into the sand, letting the waves gently touch the bottom of her dress, soaking the edges.

The sea water, airborne in the ocean spray and easily soaked into the soul, left a satisfying salt taste on her lips. Close to the water, she whispered, "Ursula."

A short distance from her, she saw the water form a calming tempest, and her friend emerged, water dripping like jewels, her head opulently crowned. She was warmed by the adoration in Ursula’s eyes. “I can’t think of anyone I’d rather have summon me.”

She ran and threw her arms around her beautiful sea goddess with a laugh.

Ursula returned the embrace with her two human hands. “Things get back to me in the ocean,” she said. “They say you were sighted flying just above us. With your daughter.”

Maleficent smiled, brimming with tears. “I found her. Can you believe it?”

Ursula squeezed her hands. “This is wonderful, Maleficent. How?”

“She came here to Storybrooke soon after you departed. She’s fierce and loving and kind. She has a smart mouth. She challenges me. She’s survived so much, and I hate that she went through those things but she’s so strong. They say the royals darkened her heart but frankly she’s as good a person as I could ever bear.” She laughed again. “She’s the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me.”

Ursula looked at her with genuine joy. “I love knowing that. I didn’t want to part with our team until I knew what had happened to you, and I’m glad you’ve come back to tell me.”

“How is your father?”

“He’s changed, has gained wisdom. He trusts me. We rule together. Now that I have that trust from him, I feel complete. I get to sing peace into people’s hearts and bring integrity to my mother’s legacy.”

 “It’s the perfect happy ending,” Mal gushed. “Who would’ve thought something like this would come to us?”

“I did. I had hope you would find Lily. I would love to meet her.”

Mal nodded. “I would love for you to meet her too, and for me to meet your father. I came to see you, but to also ask something of you. I want you to bring your singing gift to the town’s children. They’re doing a musical, and I can’t think of a better way to bring joy and healing to this place than to have them carry on your mother’s legacy. I run the library with Belle, and we can hire you as the musical director. You don’t have to truly leave the sea again. But it would mean a lot to me to have you come back to Storybrooke, to stay with me and my Lily at our home, and to help us with the children.”

Ursula looked at her closely. “You seem so happy.”

Maleficent nodded, light laughter underscoring her smile. “There is a secret I have never told you. Long ago, the queen and I fell in love. Now Regina and I have come back to one another. She is the most beautiful thing in my life, besides my daughter. Her sons are a part of the play, and that just makes it mean that much more to me. Our family, our life here, is my happy ending.”

“Well I can’t very well say no to giving the town my mother’s gift and furthering your happy ending, can I?” Ursula took her hand again. “Plus it’ll be so much fun to hide what I’m doing from my father, until I invite him to opening night.”

They smiled mischievously, giggling as they touched foreheads together.

 

Maleficent spent the morning at work simultaneously updating catalogues while email corresponding about the play with Marco and Henry, running ideas back and forth. She took notes to deliver to Belle on the meeting planned for later.

During lunch she brought a wrap from Beleaf to the break room and settled into the lavish couch covered in pretty throws. Belle, as pregnant as humanly possible, had no tolerance for uncomfortable seating and had turned the break room into a lush lounge with ocean sounds ready to go on a music player, dim lighting, and an assortment of plants, from red hibiscus to lavender, that would make any witch feel at home. Halfway through her meal she received a text from Regina. It said, “I can’t stop thinking about our kiss. And how much more I want to give you.”

She smiled to herself, torn on whether to take this as a declaration of romance or a more fleshly decree. “Whatever do you mean by ‘more’, your majesty?” she replied.

The text she received next resolved this ambiguity. Regina lay in her bed, her arm out to take the photo of herself gently biting her fingers splayed across her lips. The photo was from the waist up, and she was nude, breasts bare, with the covers draped casually across her stomach. Maleficent had seen plenty of classic art, paintings and statues of ladies near a river or somewhere similar, with random stretches of cloth covering them strategically. But there was nothing quite so erotic about them. Here, she blushed deeply, fire in her cheeks, heat pooling between her legs, at the sight of Regina on such deliciously wanton display.

With so much going on yesterday, she had had much to say to both Regina and Lily. She had chosen to go home with Lily and Diablo, talking further about flying and the play and Lily’s relationship with Emma. On the subject of Mal and Regina, Lily had said, “I love Regina and you two are so sweet together.” Maleficent had gone to sleep later with visions of something she had not had ever: a big happy family. And of course, she had gone to sleep alone, since having every person they knew in the house was not the moment for exploring what she and Regina wanted to do alone together.

Now there was this flirtation, new but intuitive. She imagined how she might stage a similar picture, how to escalate the teasing. Sitting on the chairs with her feet up, the skirt of her dress was already gathered at her waist, exposing her black lace panties. She glanced around, knowing that Belle would take a lunch at a different hour so that they could always have someone covering the floor. She slipped from the sleeves of her dress so that all of her clothing was pooled at her waist. She practiced poses, aiming the camera so that it teased the meeting of her thighs and her naked torso. She played with the different ways to splay her feet in the chair. Her hair was pinned, and she took it down to fall across her eyes. She marveled at the feeling of power, of sensuality, that this little photoshoot gave her. She took a dozen photos, and then scrolled through them before deciding on the middle one and sending it. If there was ever a need for a time travel spell, it was now, so that she could skip four hours and have her body against Regina’s.

“Mal? Have you seen my purple pillow?” she heard Belle call, and then without waiting for an answer Belle appeared in the break area. As soon as Belle saw her, she said with astounding calmness, “I’ll get it later,” and turned right around.

Maleficent put her dress back on her shoulders. After a moment of shy hesitation, she ran after Belle to the desk near the adjacent fiction section, grateful that at the very least she had not shocked the woman into labor. “I’m sorry.”

Belle gave a full laugh, taking a seat at her computer. “I wouldn’t be, if I looked like you. I would love to feel sexy again, so I’m just going to live vicariously through you.”

Maleficent brought one hand shyly to her face. “Still. I’m going to assume it’s against library rules to get naked for the woman you love in the break area.”

Belle teased her. “No, I guess it’s technically not. We have to make it a rule now, of course, and put up signs: ‘No sexting the mayor’. But I understand. How magnetic it feels with someone when you’re in a new relationship.”

“I guess it is new, in a sense,” Mal speculated. “Although I loved her for so many years in the enchanted forest.”

“Oh,” Belle exhaled. “A _rekindled_ romance.”

Mal smiled. “I like the word. To think it has never gone away, but we have chosen to come back to nurture the fire. She is the one and only person who has held my heart as my true love.”

Belle looked at her in wonder, her mouth opening in surprise, then spreading to a smile, her hand placed in adoration at her cheek. “ _Maleficent_ ,” she breathed. “I didn’t know.”

Maleficent, swept into Belle’s inexplicable wonder, nodded.

Belle said, “I just assumed, because I heard Lily a while back say she was in search of her father.”

“I don’t know who he is,” Mal confessed.

“But...” Belle tilted her head. Her eyes widened. Dawning in her voice, she said, “You don’t know, do you? No one told you.”

“What did no one tell me?”

Belle faltered, mouth moving as if she were trying but failing to find the words. Finally, she said, “There’s a book.”

 

She left work at once, and she rushed to Regina.

She recalled now, what Regina had said about books on that first day with Roland.

_And sometimes they can transform our entire perspective._

She thought about the Enchanted Forest. About that last day on the beach making love to Regina, drawing love from Regina, being consumed together with Regina in their love. About her heartbreak, but also their closeness that day, the true love she had shared with the woman she knew in her soul she would never let go of.

She thought about the addiction she formed immediately thereafter. Her mistakes. Her oblivion.

She thought about her warm bedding in the Forbidden Fortress, about just how long it took Lily to grow, how long it took her to realize her precious baby was there.

She thought about the potion she had given Regina, the second one, the one that was supposed to make this impossible. But this was not the precision of science – this was the wonder of magic.

She ran with the book in her arms.

And when Regina opened the door, she took in the sight of the woman before her. She had gazed upon her through the years in so many dimensions. As an intruder moments from being obliterated. As a hero who had given her back her own body. As a student, a lover, a partner, a memory, a fire rekindled.

Her true love.

The one she did not know she had been looking for.

She gave Regina an enraptured, tearful, urgent kiss, wrapping her arms around her. Every touch felt imbibed with magic. Their lips together. Her fingertips against Regina’s hips. Her abdomen, her entire body, brushed together against Regina’s.

“You said once, that you didn’t know if we could make something as magical as true love’s kiss. What if we could? What if that was just the beginning? What if the magic between us was so much more even than that?”

Regina touched her hair, searching her eyes. “Is that what was so urgent? You want to test our magic together?”

She pulled Regina close again, feeling so calm, so fully centered, even in the midst of this revelation. “I don’t know if we could ever outdo ourselves.”

She presented the book to Regina. “It’s about all of the magic of our home world. It’s like Henry’s book, but about how different forms of magic work. And look.”

There were pages and pages in the thick book. About the dark ones, the sorcerer, the fairies, the mermaids. But the most important to her were the handful about dragons. She handed the opened book to Regina:

A dragon's heart

Full and true

May combine to make a lovers' brew

With a true love in either shape

Human or dragon magically made

Fertile or barren, any sex

As long as their souls connect

And from this act of making love

They can create a child thereof

This is the one and only way

That a dragon child is made

Regina looked up at her from the pages. Her eyes searched Maleficent’s, matching her same wonder. Speechlessly, Regina pulled her close, and the two of them held each other’s faces in their hands. Regina smiled, and then laughed, as tears flooded her eyes. She held understanding and joy in her deep, sparkling eyes. “Lily is my baby.”

Maleficent kissed Regina again and again, nodding, crying as Regina’s hands kept her close around her waist. “Lily is _our_ baby.”

“This means we made her together. We made her from true love,” Regina reiterated. Mal’s head was buried into Regina’s neck as she gave her kiss after kiss.

“I first saw her in that diner, pouring coffee,” Regina said, holding her close. “I didn’t recognize her, I didn’t imagine she was mine, I didn’t think I would care so strongly. But somehow I did. I talked Emma down from hurting her, and everything in me needed her to be okay, more than I could explain to myself, more than even my feelings for you would explain. And this whole time, since she came to dinner that day, I’ve loved her so much. Even before that, I needed to know her. And now it’s not even a question. I know she’s my baby.” She laughed, crying simultaneously. “We have to talk to her right now.”

“She’s at work, I didn’t know what to do, who to talk to first. She doesn’t know,’ Mal said.

So they called her.

“Hi honey,” Mal said, over speaker phone.

“Hi,” Regina added, and it was infused with such bubbly nerves, so much lovestruck enchantment, that Lily gave a bemused giggle on the other line.

“Hey. What are you two up to?”

“We need to talk to you in person.” She did not need to clarify that it was a good thing, that Lily did not have to worry. She and Regina exuded it.

“Okay. I’m taking an hour lunch in like five minutes. Should I come over?”

They sent each other confused gestures. “Yes,” Maleficent finally answered. “Yes, an hour is a good amount of time for this conversation.”

Regina enchanted the front door of the house, sealing it with blood magic. “I know in my entire heart that she is mine,” she said. “But let’s put some theater into this.”

And when Lily came through the door like it was nothing, Regina let out an amazed gasp and broke into waterworks. Lily regarded her freshly spilling tears of joy with the same puzzlement she had had over the phone. “Hey mom,” she said to Maleficent. “Hey Regina. Are you okay?”

Regina put her hands over her mouth, crying harder, nodding. She approached Lily, looking closely upon her face, examining her features. She stroked Lily’s cheek. “You look so much like me.”

Lily looked at her with confusion, but as her eyes scanned Regina’s, that confusion turned to dawning. She turned her eyes between Regina and Maleficent, gazing at each of their faces. “I look like you both,” she practically whispered. She surprised them with a giddy laugh. “Wait. _Really_?”

“Sit with us,” Maleficent said.

Together, the three of them sat with the book. They read the poem. They flipped through the pages.

“When you came through the door, you broke through Regina’s blood magic,” Maleficent said. “Nobody, no matter how powerful, could do that. Nobody but someone carrying Regina’s blood.”

Lily was brought to tears, but it was with the same joy as Regina and Mal. Maleficent had been somewhat unsure of how Lily would react, but Lily was not hurt, not offended, not appalled by Maleficent's lack of education and awareness. She gave Maleficent the gift of grace, understanding. Belonging to Regina and Maleficent at once made her feel "safe and loved. You have both shown how much you love me. And you’re the two most badass women I know. I can’t imagine two people I’d rather have as parents.” She looked down at her own wrist. “I have this star. And when I found you, mom, its purple color deepened. And ever since I had dinner that first night with you, Regina, it became even more vibrant. I wasn’t sure I knew what it meant, but I imagined you were going to be special to me because of how much you loved my mother. I didn’t guess that it meant you _are_ my mother.”

They all gazed at her birthmark.

Lily went on. “I think it was a means for me to find you two. A way that the universe took care of me when I felt alone, a way for me to know when I had come back to the two people who loved me most.”

When Maleficent and Regina each brushed their thumbs over it, it glowed with magic.

 

Lily went back to work at the end of her lunch hour. She would come back later, she promised.

“So what now?” Regina asked. “We should process this more. I have so many questions.”

“We should,” Maleficent said, kissing Regina’s lips. Moving to Regina’s jaw, she said, “We have so much processing to do.”

Regina giggled, pliable, giving into the neck kisses. “I sense this processing is not going to be particularly wordy.”

Mal kissed her lips, running her fingers through her hair, climbing onto Regina on the couch. “I just,” she kissed Regina’s neck.

“I know, me too,” Regina said, looking up at her with love and desire. Regina put her own fingers in Mal’s hair, clenching tightly as she kissed her hard. “Come upstairs,” she whispered, and put both arms and legs around Mal as Maleficent picked her up and carried her. She dropped to her feet at the staircase. Mal pulled Regina’s shirt off and unhooked her bra.

Regina pulled Mal’s dress over her head as they entered the bedroom. Mal moved to Regina’s breasts, kissing the sweet flesh as they fell into the bed.

 “What if…” Regina breathed. She pulled Maleficent up, kissing her lips.

“What?”

“We can make a baby. Another one. What if that happened?”

Maleficent hovered above her. “The book has a contraceptive spell.”

Regina hesitated, then nodded.

Maleficent went downstairs to get the book. She flipped through the pages and made a mental note to remind herself to also give the spell to Emma and Lily. Her daughter. Her child with Regina. She was halfway back up the stairs before she considered the implication of Regina’s hesitation, the alternate meaning in her words.

Returning with the book, she crawled back onto the bed with Regina, kissing her, running her fingers along her hips. “We don’t have to do this.”

“Mal, I am going to implode if you don’t touch me,” Regina said, sliding her fingernails seductively against Mal’s thighs.

“The spell,” Mal clarified. “We don’t have to do it. We could see what happens. We could let true love lead us where it may.”

Regina nodded, eyes on the verge of spilling. She pushed the book off of the bed, and it landed heavily on her carpet.

They spent the next few hours occupying Regina’s bed, giving each other attention, affirmation, pleasure, joy. They whispered promises, they gave sweet, gentle assurances as they moved their bodies together, climbing to their highest points over and over.

Regina led them to the shower and they continued their new exploration of each other’s bodies, gravitating toward genuine washing and then pulling themselves back to their reawakened sexual passion. “I love showering and bathing in this world,” Regina said. The soap she applied to Maleficent’s breasts was scented like apples, and she kissed the skin where hot water washed it away. She nipped at Maleficent’s nipples, sucking water from them, grinding her body against Maleficent’s thigh. She slid her fingers against Maleficent’s dripping wet center and entered her. Mal sighed pliantly into the touch, putty as Regina worked her fingers, kissed her nipples, and grinded against her. Her breath hitched as Regina brought her closer and closer to the height of bliss, and she gasped and clung roughly to handfuls of Regina’s hair as a climax washed over her. Regina held her up against the shower wall, continuing to plant kisses along her breasts, neck, jaw, and shoulders. Regina said, “Whether it’s a shower, a bath, rain, or snow, water always feels like a new beginning. It feels cleansing on more than just a physical level.”

Mal nodded, holding her close under the stream of water, unable to let her go. “I feel the same way. This is our new chance.”

 

The new tea Lily came up with was called Annie & Oliver: Spiced Ginger with free refills if you know the magic phrase. It overtook Zelena’s drink as the most popular, said Lily, which Zelena took surprisingly well since she was part of the play production now.

And then there was Mothers' Love, for Regina and Maleficent. It was made of sage and thyme.

Things marched on with joy and progress, with new chances, with kept promises, with their family around them. They had dinners with guests like Ursula and too many other friends to count. They played theatrical games in front of the fireplace, they made snowmen, and planted flowers, and had water balloon fights, and made jack-o-lanterns. They created so much jubilance from what had once been fear and ashes and terrible mistakes. Maleficent remembered what Regina had said. That she was worthy. And facing this truth, she embraced her second chance, uncursed and unashamed, enchanted with more family than she had ever imagined, redeemed by their love.


End file.
